Patient safety Patient safety is the avoidance of unintended or unexpected harm to people during the provision of health care

More than one million people use the NHS each day, and making sure they receive safe and reliable care is essential.

Our recent work and content on this topic is listed below.

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OASI Care Bundle: A multi-centre quality improvement project to reduce the incidence of obstetric anal sphincter injury

Improvement project

This project aimed to reduce rates of obstetric anal sphincter injury (OASI) following childbirth through use of an evidence-based care bundle, supported by an awareness campaign and multidisciplinary...

Blog

11 July 2013

Healthcare staff are usually motivated to enter their professions by a desire to make a difference for patients and service users. Why then do they find it so hard to speak up for patients when they s...

News

3 July 2013

The Health Foundation has launched a new supplement today in the Nursing Times that explores how nurses are using proactive approaches to manage patient safety. The supplement, Nursing a safer future,...

In-depth case study

July 2013

This special supplement explores how nurses are using proactive approaches to manage patient safety.

Taking further steps: human factors in healthcare

Blog

27 June 2013

Human factors, also known as ‘ergonomics’, is much more widely talked about in healthcare now than it was when my first wife died during in an attempted routine operation in 2005. When I started talki...

Blog

25 June 2013

The headlines last week about the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) handling of concerns at University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust have reignited the debate about how to ensure healt...

A national approach to patient safety in primary care

Newsletter feature

19 June 2013

Dr Neil Houston, tells us more about how the Scottish Patient Safety Programme in Primary Care programme aims to transform safety culture in primary care.

Event report

June 2013

Learning from a roundtable event to explore how the public, patients, their families and carers can be involved in improving patient safety.

Staying on top of patient safety

Blog

4 June 2013

Since the publication of Organisation with a Memory in 2000 there has been much progress on improving patient safety. The introduction of systematic incident reporting has raised awareness about the l...

Newsletter feature

22 May 2013

There is a growing interest in proactive approaches to safety management – putting systems in place to ensure safety, rather than responding when things go wrong. We asked Simon Dodds, a consultant su...

Newsletter feature

22 May 2013

A day hospital in Cardiff is reducing visits to A&E through an integrated healthcare programme that helps older people reduce their risk of falls. When an older person is referred to the John Pathy Da...

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Patient safety Patient safety is the avoidance of unintended or unexpected harm to people during the provision of health care

OASI Care Bundle: A multi-centre quality improvement project to reduce the incidence of obstetric anal sphincter injury

Why do people find it so hard to speak out in the interests of patients?

Nursing a safer future supplement launched in today’s Nursing Times

Nursing a safer future: How nurses are using proactive approaches to manage patient safety

Taking further steps: human factors in healthcare

Being sensitive to poor care

A national approach to patient safety in primary care

Involving people in safety

Staying on top of patient safety

Safety by design: why wait for the harm to happen?

Helping older people stay safe reduces demand on A&E

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The Q community

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