Improving Patient Safety in Mental Health

In brief

Each year over a million people receive care from specialist mental health services, and there are approximately 160,000 admissions to hospital for mental illness.

Mental health service users, especially when acutely ill, are vulnerable to a number of potential risks, including from their care or treatment. This makes mental health service users a particularly vulnerable group of patients within the NHS.

The aim of the ‘Improving patient safety in mental health’ programme is to support four organisations across the UK to improve the reliability of care in order to reduce harm and raise safety awareness throughout their organisations.

Participating organisations will aim to produce a tested set of change packages replicable across other mental health care providers.