The Health Foundation responds to 'Sign up to Safety'

Today (24 June 2014) the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt MP, has announced the next stage of ‘Sign up to Safety’ a national campaign for the NHS in England.

In reaction, Dr Jennifer Dixon, Chief Executive of the Health Foundation, comments:

'The focus on patient safety in the campaign is very welcome. The campaign should be underpinned by a clear strategy for how to improve care across England for the next 5 years, based on tried and tested quality improvement techniques. A strategy produced through the combined efforts of national, regional and local organisations, and with input from patients and the public, would fill a current gap. It would be a much needed route map for how the NHS can speed up improvements to both safety and the quality of care.'

The Health Foundation has funded programmes and evaluations across the UK to improve patient safety for the last decade.  Based on our learning, we recommend the campaign takes the following approaches to be effective:

• When setting national safety priorities, ensure local providers have freedom to respond in a way that suits their own diagnosis of the main risks of harm to patients
• Encourage providers to use a broad range of data and other indicators to try to predict the risk of harm occurring to patients as well as measuring past harm to patients
• Support local teams to understand the data about their systems and services and act on it to reduce the risks of harm occurring to patients
• Help leaders to create the space, culture and processes to enable improvement work to take place. 

Media contact:

Mike Findlay, Media Manager
T: 020 7257 8047
E: mike.findlay@health.org.uk