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...

Journal article

15 March 2017

Over the last forty years, nursing's claim to professional expertise has been expressed in terms of its care-giving function. Informed by a distinctive ‘holistic’ approach, models of nursing identify ...

Journal article

15 March 2017

The role and value of theory in improvement work in healthcare has been seriously underrecognised. We join others in proposing that more informed use of theory can strengthen improvement programmes an...

Journal article

15 March 2017

Evaluation of improvement initiatives in healthcare is essential to establishing whether interventions are effective and to understanding how and why they work in order to enable replication. Although...

Journal article

14 March 2017

Background: It is recognised that involving lay people with research in a meaningful rather than tokenistic way is both important and challenging. In a recent health services research study addressing...

Journal article

1 March 2017

Healthcare organisations are often encouraged to learn from other industries in order to develop proactive and rigorous safety management practices. In the UK safety–critical industries safety cases h...

Journal article

1 March 2017

Background: Centrally led performance management regimes using standard setting, monitoring, and incentives have become a prominent feature of infection prevention and control (IPC) in health systems....

Event

2 February 2017

The International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare is a biannual gathering of health care professionals in quality improvement and patient safety. The Forum is regularly attended by over 3...

Blog

22 December 2016

Twelve years ago I received a phone call. I was working for a national body responsible for investigating concerns about serious care failures. The caller suspected that people with learning disabilit...

Quality at a cost

QualityWatch

December 2016

Quality at a cost is the fourth annual statement from QualityWatch, a joint research programme from the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation.

A lay perspective on collaborative patient engagement

Blog

7 October 2016

When you see best practice of effective collaboration between health care professional and patient, it stands out a mile. And there is a lot of it around, despite the temptation to always focus on the...

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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

Re-conceptualising holism in the contemporary nursing mandate: from individual to organisational relationships

Demystifying theory and its use in improvement

What to expect when you're evaluating healthcare improvement: a concordat approach to managing collaboration and uncomfortable realities

Patient and public involvement in data collection for health services research: a descriptive study

Should healthcare providers do safety cases? Lessons from a cross-industry review of safety case practices

Qualitative study of views and experiences of performance management for healthcare-associated infections

International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare

Still doing the system’s business

Quality at a cost

A lay perspective on collaborative patient engagement

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