The NHS wants to be the safest healthcare system in the world – that is its stated aim. As we wait to hear the results of a public consultation 1 with a strategy designed to sit alongside the NHS Long Term Plan, Kate Woodhead RGN DMS, analyses the challenges facing the patient safety movement.
Proposals have been set out by NHS Improvement’s national director of patient safety, Dr Aidan Fowler, as part of a public consultation. The commitment includes a proposal for some of the most important types of avoidable harm to patients to be halved over the next five years in areas such as medication errors and never events, together with development of a “just culture” where frontline staff are supported to speak up when they see things going wrong. We await the publication of this strategy.
Meanwhile an eminent source of innovative research has published a view of the challenges ahead, with a more global perspective.2 The patient safety movement has always been a global one and it seems a pragmatic way forward that high income countries which have similar issues across the board should share solutions and actions, while supporting low and middle income countries to ‘leapfrog’ some of the painful developments, and find innovation and creativity in the here and now. This will require tremendous collaborative effort and leadership from the various institutions which are currently leading the way.
Patient safety
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