The Health Select Committee has commended the Safer Patients Initiative in a report published today following an enquiry into patient safety. The Health Foundation responded by calling on boards to implement Safer Patients Initiative. The Safer Patients Initiative was launched in 2004 to find practical ways of improving patient safety.
The Committee recommended that effective safety initiatives such as the Safer Patients Initiative need to be implemented quickly by the NHS.
The report has raised concerns that the NHS has failed to collect evidence about whether patients are any safer after a decade of initiatives to stop harm.
It also warned that NHS boards are not paying enough attention to patient safety and are too often preoccupied by governance, finances and targets.
The Committee highlighted that they want to see boards and senior management in the NHS make patient safety their top priority. They stated in the report, “we commend to NHS organisations the measures piloted as part of the Safer Patients Initiative to ensure that Boards maintain safety as their foremost priority.”
Responding to the Health Select Committee report on patient safety, Stephen Thornton, chief executive of the Health Foundation said: “This is a thorough and well researched report, revealing the Committee’s deep understanding of the key issues. It lays out a set of sound and manageable recommendations which should be implemented without delay”.
“We are delighted to see they are commending good practice, especially the Health Foundation’s Safer Patients Initiative on which the current national patient safety first campaign is based.”
He continued, “It is time for every single NHS board to step back and ask themselves some hard questions. There are known and proven approaches to improving patient safety in acute hospitals that have been shown to work by the hospitals participating in the Health Foundation’s Safer Patient Initiative but are not currently being implemented in every trust.
“Momentum is growing but we want every patient to receive care in a hospital that has these approaches hardwired. We now want to see every trust adopt the approaches and put achieving this at the top of their agenda. This challenge should not be under-estimated. As the Committee notes, board leadership is critical – that is why one of the approaches is leadership itself. It also requires the wider NHS system to back the trusts with support and a conducive policy and regulatory context.”
“Therefore, we welcome the committee’s recommendations that boards and senior management make patient safety a top priority.”
The Health Select Committee report on patient safety and recommendations can be found at www.parliament.uk/healthcom/