The Health Foundation is an independent charity working to continuously improve the quality of heatlhcare in the UK
View another project
See also
External sites

Journey to Safety

Original research

Overview

Journey to Safety is a five-year research programme (2006–2011), supporting Professor Charles Vincent and colleagues from Imperial College London at the Imperial Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality (CPSSQ), examining how to improve the safety of an entire healthcare organisation.

This research funding has led to a range of academic conference presentations and publications.

What we’re doing

Since 2006 we have been supporting the CPSSQ in their aim to understand the nature, scale and causes of harm and of making healthcare safer for patients and their families.

Journey to Safety aims to contribute to that understanding and assist the Health Foundation in comprehending the journey to safety in general and the achievements of the Safer Patients Initiative in particular.

The research undertaken has been examining five core issues essential for any safety programme:

  1. The role of the patient in patient safety
  2. Raising awareness of safety issues across organisations
  3. The improvement of clinical processes
  4. High reliability units and the transformation of whole organisations
  5. How safety is addressed at each level of an organisation in a series of nested steps (focusing on our Safer Patients Initiative).

The study of our Safer Patients Initiative 1 has captured lessons learned for UK healthcare, and helped to build the body of knowledge around the fifth issue: how safety is addressed at each level of an organisation in a series of nested steps.

Why we’re doing it

Providing consistent, high quality, safe and effective care for patients requires appropriate design and operation of what are often complex and dynamic systems of care deliver.

In 2006, we identified the transformation of whole healthcare organisations as one of the key challenges for patient safety over the next five to 10 years. We saw the importance of supporting leading academics in this field, to enable emerging new ideas to be explored. With this research we have aimed to build the evidence for improving patient safety and gain a solid understanding of the steps that need to be taken to create safe healthcare organisations.

Publications

To date, this research has contributed to several publications.

For further information please contact:

Jonathan Bamber, Research and Development Manager

Back to top