Patient Safety Principles and their practical application
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Patient Safety Principles and their practical application
I hope that, like me, you were pleased to see the Patient Safety Commissioner announce the outcome of her consultation on the Principles of Patient Safety. The principles can be found here. They make good sense but beg the question about their implementation, which is always the really hard part.
At AvMA, we hear first-hand from patients about the issues they face when they, or a loved one, has a medical accident. Too often, that experience is poor and speaks to the defensive culture frequently referred to when discussing healthcare. For that reason, when we set our current strategy, a key objective was to seek to reduce compounded harm that too often occurs and which adds to the physical and/or emotional pain and trauma people may already be suffering. Given healthcare is supposed to be dedicated to healing, there is an irony that those it harms end up much worse off.
The Harmed Patient Pathway
For that reason, a few weeks ago, we, in collaboration with those with lived experience from the Harmed Patients Alliance, launched our joint consultation on what we call the Harmed Patient Pathway. The consultation closes for comments on 2nd December.
The Pathway should complement the work being done to improve incident learning, such as through NHS England’s Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), which we hope will bring positive changes and improvements to incident identification and learning.
And whilst harmed patients want to see learning and improvement because they don’t want what happened to them or a loved one to be repeated, they need more than that. We believe that our proposed Pathway is a means to secure what is needed and remove the compounded harm that we have been witnessing first-hand for over 40 years. In so doing, we believe this is a practical way for the NHS to show that it is living the Patient Safety Principles that the Patient Safety Commissioner has now issued.
AvMA’s Strategic Updates and Future Goals
Developing the Harmed Patient Pathway with our colleagues at the Harmed Patients Alliance has been full on and taken up a huge amount of time. However, I believe the results could be transformative for harmed patients if adopted and supported by the NHS and other healthcare providers.
In addition to this work, I have also been busy over the last six months with many back-office changes at AvMA. We started with the office itself, which we sold because it was no longer meeting our needs as we are now a remote organisation. We will therefore be breaking our long association with Croydon and taking a small, shared space somewhere in central London. Watch out for a change of address on our website!
And, in a moment of epiphany earlier this year, we realised that the way to improve our financial position, where we were running annual deficits, is to invest in additional fundraising capacity. To that end, we have just recruited a Director of Fundraising, Marketing and Communications to bring more rigour to that area of our work and build our fundraising capacity for the invaluable work we do, for which there is huge support already.
Finally, given our strategic ambitions to collaborate with others to improve patient safety and not accept its normalisation within a degraded NHS, we are recruiting a new Policy and Campaigns Manager, in part to replace Liz Thomas, who retired earlier this year, and to give further impetus to our work linked to our strategy which can be found here.
Supporting Harmed Patients and Future Collaboration
So, as ever, it’s never a dull moment at AvMA. Thank you to everyone who continues to lend their support to us and to help the valuable work we do to support harmed patients and their loved ones. If you would like to contribute to our work and help us support more harmed patients, please donate.
_________________________
Action against Medical Accidents (AvMA) is the UK’s leading patient safety and access to justice charity. We offer a range of services to patients and families impacted by avoidable medical harm. We are completely independent and rely on volunteers, fundraising and generous donations from supporters to enable us to help patients and bring about change. Find out more at www.avma.org.uk
Donate
You will also be helping us give vital support to injured patients and be a powerful voice for patients, patient safety, and justice.
#PatientSafety #NHS #AccessToJustice #HarmedPatientPathway