A whole system approach to using data to improve safety in acute mental health services NHS Tayside

Contact: Morag MacRae, Patient Safety Development Manager, NHS Tayside

NHS Tayside provides health care services to a population of around 400,000 people in the Angus, City of Dundee, and Perth and Kinross areas of Scotland. An integrated health system, it commissions and provides primary and community care, and has three acute hospitals, 11 community hospitals, three mental health hospitals and 69 GP practices.

Healthcare Improvement Scotland, who are partners in this project, deliver the Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP), which is focused on reducing avoidable harm across adult acute, maternity, neonates, paediatrics, primary care and mental health services. The NHS Tayside project will build on the work of the mental health SPSP and will test the application of the Safety Measurement and Monitoring Framework to adult acute mental health services.

The project team will develop a set of measures that will allow individual wards or localities to assess their performance against each of the domains of the framework. They will then test the practical application of this information and to what extent it can inform and drive improvement in safety.

NHS Tayside has a robust improvement plan in place for mental health services and improvements in patient safety are a key part of this. This plan forms the foundations by which the application of the framework will be tested. Examples of some of the improvement work include the introduction of a structured approach to measuring patient perception of safety, and redesigning incident summary reports to ensure they provide meaningful information that can be used to improve clinical care.