East Midlands AHSN and our East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative (PSC) were delighted to host a visit from Aidan Fowler, NHS National Director of Patient Safety, Phil Duncan, NHS Head of Patient Safety Programmes, both from NHS England and Improvement, on Thursday 23 January.

Aidan and Phil arranged the visit, along with visits to other AHSN’s across the country, to hear more about the approach to patient safety in the region and the impacts of some of our patient safety work.

During the morning of their visit, they heard more about EMAHSN and the East Midlands PSC from Nicole McGlennon, Managing Director, and Eddie Alder, Head of Patient Safety. This session covered who we are, how we operate and our future vision for our patient safety work.

The afternoon covered three work programmes with important impacts and learnings for patient safety:

PINCER – (Pharmacist-led information technology INtervention for reducing Clinically important ERrors) is software that helps GPs identify patients at risk of some common and important prescribing errors.

PINCER originated in the East Midlands, developed by research fellows at the University of Nottingham in partnership with PRIMIS, who offer the software and training associated to PINCER.

EMAHSN and the Health Foundation provided funding to support scale up within the East Midlands. As part of this work, 2.9 million patient records were searched with more than 21,000 instances of potentially hazardous prescribing identified.

As a result of the successes of PINCER in the East Midlands, it was selected as one of the Medicines Optimisation projects for national adoption and spread across the AHSN Network in 2018-2020.

PINCER is a great example of how medicines optimisation can have a large impact on the safety of patients. There have also been some crucial learnings about re-importing a project which originated in the region, which were shared with Aidan and Phil.

Medicines Safety – In this section we discussed our approach to the new national patient safety medicines safety workstream. Outlining our work on a medicines administration in care homes scoping exercise and the type of methodologies that are being explored.

LPZ – Care Homes Harms Prevalence Audit Tool – This project works with care homes to introduce a tool which measures the prevalence of common care issues such as pressure ulcers, continence, nutrition, falls, restraint, pain and deterioration. Understanding the prevalence of common care issues enables care homes to put in place quality improvement measures to improve the care they deliver.

In this session we talked about the progress of the project since 2015, key learnings and the great foundations this has created for our patient safety work with care homes.

Following the visit, Aidan said “we’re looking to continually improve all areas of patient safety and there is lots of ambition – there are great ideas coming out of the East Midlands with some really interesting approaches, for example around the work with care homes.”

East Midlands AHSN Managing Director Nicole McGlennon said “We were delighted to welcome Aidan and Phil today. It was great to learn more about their ambitions for patient safety and how the AHSNs and PSCs can support this vital work.”