Closing the Gap in Patient Safety A programme that supported teams to implement and evaluate tested, evidence-based patient safety interventions at scale in health and social care

Closing the Gap in Patient Safety was the fourth and final round of our Closing the Gap improvement programme, which supported front-line teams to tackle the gap between best practice and the routine delivery of care.

Aims

The projects represented a wide range of organisations and health care settings and aimed to demonstrate an impact on an identified patient safety hazard or problem. The project interventions had already been tested on a small scale and were evidence based with a logical rationale for why they were used to address the identified patient safety problem/hazard for that project.

Projects

Due to the range of skills and experience required (such as quality improvement, evaluation and clinical/service expertise), the projects were delivered by a group of organisations working together. Each project included at least one organisation with the ability to influence wider practice and opinion.

The types of project funded included:

• approaches to build skills in improving patient safety
• interventions to improve the reliability of clinical care
• creating the conditions for the delivery of safer care.