To mark World Patient Safety Day and International Patient Safety Day (17 September 2019) I wanted to reflect on how the UK’s network of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives fit into the bigger picture of a culture of safety within the health and care system.
From a worldwide perspective, patient safety as a theme unites our unique health and care systems as safety can only be achieved through an integrated approach which focuses on continuous improvement and learning – regardless of the country in question, to improve patient safety the process needs to be iterative.
As a network of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives working in our local regions, our workstreams reflect key areas of importance nationally which we act on at a local level. These workstreams include the adoption and spread of proven safety initiatives; deterioration; maternal and neonatal; and medicines safety. Our overall aim is simple: to make care safer.
Enabling patient safety
As a network, we see that there are number of enablers and underpinning principles to achieve greater patient safety and these are key components of our work.
- Creating a culture of patient safety – without a shift in culture, patient safety initiatives can’t succeed. Culture is at the forefront of successful patient safety improvement programmes.
- Building improvement capability – focusing on Quality Improvement skills and education enables empowerment of team members to fully plan, do, study and act on their own patient safety measures.
- Working with patients, carers and families – patients, carers and families are the reason patient safety initiatives exist, it’s so important that they are involved – whether this is by co-designing pathways or providing feedback on safety programmes.
A global approach to patient safety
As patient safety is centred on learning, it makes sense that we learn from the best examples across the UK – which is the beauty of being part of a national network – but also from the best examples across the world.
One of the patient safety projects that we facilitate in the East Midlands, as part of our work on deterioration, is a project imported from the Netherlands. We knew that locally, and nationally, patient safety is a common issue in care homes, so we searched for proven initiatives to tackle this and the Netherlands had a proven and impactful programme.
The Landielijke Pravelentiemeting Zorgkwaliteit (LPZ) - Care Homes Harms Prevalence Audit Tool measures the incidence of common care issues such as pressure ulcers, continence, nutrition, falls, restraint and pain. Routinely reviewing LPZ data, allows care homes to make their own improvements to the care they deliver resulting in reduced falls, reduced pressure ulcers and improved continence and pain management. Following a recent HSJ Patient Safety Award’s win the project was praised for the bottom-up approach for care home professionals to learn new skills and empower them to improve their own ways of working.
The project is quickly spreading across the East Midlands, with 39 care homes participating in 2018 and 69 signed up to take part from November 2019.
To me, this project is a perfect example of how learning from other countries can be successfully translated to our own environments and make such a big difference to patient safety and staff morale. By investing in frontline members of care home teams there is a real ripple effect which benefits the patients, staff and health and care system alike.
Our international colleagues who also use LPZ (in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and Turkey) have been so impressed with the level of engagement and the frontline improvement initiatives from our homes, that they are now taking lessons from us. A great example of this is in Austria where they are translating our education resources into German and organising engagement and awards events for their top care home improvers.
In my opinion, this is an example of enabling a patient safety culture through shared learning at its best.
If you’d like to know more about the LPZ programme, engage with us on social media @EM_AHSN using the following hashtags #LPZ_international and #CareHomesLPZ
If you’d like to know more about the work of the East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative, you can visit our webpages.
Author
Laura Hailes, Senior Improvement Lead