- Date published
- July 2010
- Download publication [187kb PDF]
The Health Foundation is a champion of quality improvement in patient safety, and has worked on a number of programmes designed to build knowledge in this area.
We believe that our unique contribution provides:
- a focus for initiating, testing and developing new approaches to patient safety in a coordinated way
- an infrastructure on which to build skills, enhance capability and increase capacity for improvement in patient safety, without organisations having to rely on the enthusiasm of a handful of key individuals
- the influencing of policy makers and politicians to ensure policy focuses on quality and safety.
As well as supporting the Safer Patients Network, the Health Foundation has developed partnerships with SHAs (Strategic Health Authorities) to promote the wide uptake of safety intervention.
Some of the fundamental priorities for clinicians, managers, boards and policy makers which have been identified from this work are as follows:
- Build the evidence base. We must continue to do this in order to be able to identify the interventions that really work in practice and should be adopted.
- Investigate the productivity challenge. We need to understand the economic impact of patient safety activity and find ways to help the NHS improve patient safety, while addressing the productivity challenge.
- Adopt a proactive approach to patient safety. People working in healthcare must be empowered to proactively look for risks so that early risk identification and mitigation become the norm, rather than learning from errors after they happen.
- Find ways to increase patient involvement in safety. There is growing awareness of the need to involve patients in identifying risk, describing their experiences and developing solutions.
- Learn from other industries. There is a lot we can learn from other safety critical industries, for example, how to create highly reliable organisations, or how to develop leadership and capability for safety improvement.
- Learn more about safety outside of the acute sector. Not enough is known about patient safety in sectors such as primary care and mental health, or how to make improvements across such complex sectors.
