Data should play a fundamental role in assessing the performance of healthcare organisations. Yet NHS ‘culture’ – a theme so central to the Francis report – fundamentally mistrusts, undervalues and mi...
Following the Francis Inquiry, we need to look at the roles of Hospital Standardised Mortality Rates (HSMR) and Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicators (SHMI). It may seem obvious – given that Mid...
In the 12 years since the establishment of the National Patient Safety Agency, there’s been concerted effort to improve patient safety, largely through the reporting of harm incurred during healthcare...
Spanning system boundaries is part and parcel of what charities aiming to improve healthcare do – we work with healthcare professionals, leaders, policy makers, people living with health conditions an...
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...
What does a ‘listening organisation’ look like? What benefits can it bring to our patients and to our staff? The more we involve patients, the more we make their experience of care better. We can iden...
One of my favourite quotes is William Gibson's 'The future is here, it’s just not very evenly distributed'. I saw some of that future at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield on Friday, at a pres...
Accident and Emergency Departments are backing up, GPs cannot cope with their workload, ‘out-of-hours’ services are unsatisfactory: looks like it is time to invent a new service. Shall we start wit...
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...
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...
