KATE WOODHEAD RGN DMS provides an insight into the development of new national and local standards for surgical patient safety and examines some of the challenges ahead.
Patient safety is once again back in the limelight – this time the emphasis is on surgical safety. The Never Events preliminary data from 2014/2015 show that there were 126 incidents of wrong site surgery, 102 retained foreign objects and 38 wrong prosthetic implant incidents in the NHS in England, last year.1 Despite all the alerts, patient safety reports, the team briefings and the WHO checklists, we are continuing to cause considerable harm to patients.
The NHS England Surgical Never Events Taskforce report which was published in February 2014 initially identified the development of national surgical standards.2 In the report, the taskforce recommended that there should be a new emphasis on surgical safety within three themes which they denoted as ‘standardise, educate and harmonise’. The aim is to develop more consistency across all the different Trusts and private hospitals delivering NHS contracts, in order to reduce harmful incidents.
The three recommended themes were cited as below:
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