Patient safety: snapshot

When patients receive NHS treatment, they rightly believe they will get the best possible care and that they will be safe.

The majority of the one million people that use the NHS each day are treated without incident or threat to their safety. However, it is estimated that up to 10% of patients admitted to hospital experience some form of harm.

These incidents cause pain and suffering to the individuals and their families, damage confidence in the NHS, demoralise healthcare staff and result in huge cost to the health service. Improving quality and safety in healthcare must therefore be the top priority for NHS staff, managers and boards.

However, measures of performance on quality indicate that the NHS is finding it difficult to embed reliable and sustainable improvements. Although there are pockets of excellence, there are also gaps in the implementation of best practice. With the quality agenda largely focused on the dissemination of guidelines and standards, little attention has been paid to how changes can be introduced reliably and consistently.

This ‘snapshot’ gives a brief overview of our work across patient safety. It includes background information, our work in this area, our learning so far, key priorities and how to get involved.

Our programmes demonstrate that improving the reliability of care leads to reduced actual and potential harm. Our patient safety activities are broad and ambitious:

• A network approach to safer acute care: developing expertise and spreading safety improvement across the NHS
• Creating safer systems: using a clinical systems approach to identify where risk of harm to patients can be minimised
• Safety in different healthcare settings: programmes to improve safety and reliability in maternity, mental health and primary care services 
• Working with strategic health authorities: to support the development of their safety infrastructure and promote the uptake of safety interventions
• Working with trust boards: to make clinical quality and safety a strategic priority, and to demonstrate the important role that boards can play in promoting and embedding patient safety  
• Strengthening the evidence base: by sharing learning from our research and development and improvement programmes
• Influencing policy makers and politicians to ensure policy focuses on patient safety.

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