Listening to patients, carers and staff, learning from what they say when things go wrong and take action to improve patients’ safety.

Sign up to Safety is designed to help realise the ambition of making the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world by creating an environment devoted to continuous learning and improvement. This ambition is bigger than any individual or organisation and achieving it requires us all to unite behind this common purpose. We need to give patients confidence that we are doing all we can to ensure that the care they receive will be safe and effective at all times.

We all recognise that healthcare carries some risk and while everyone working in the NHS works hard every day to reduce this risk, harm still happens. Whenever possible, we must do all we can to deliver harm free care for every patient, every time, everywhere. We must be open with our patients and colleagues about the potential for things to go wrong and for people to get hurt, and most of all, we must continuously learn from what happens in order to improve.

We all accept and embrace the learning that is needed when patients are harmed and we all know it imperative to raise concerns.

That is why Yeovil District Hospital has joined the Sign up to Safety Campaign. This campaign will support people to feel safe to speak up when things do go wrong. Everyone involved in caring for patients, and those in roles supporting care for patients, needs to know that they can have these conversations and that they will be heard – they can save lives.

Everyone involved in caring for patients can make a difference. By harnessing the talent and enthusiasm across the health and care system, together we can make enduring changes to improve safety, halve avoidable harm and most importantly make a positive difference to the people we care for. Together, as a whole healthcare system, we can save 6,000 lives over the next three years.

 

As part of the campaign we have signed up to five core pledges:

1. Put safety first. Commit to reduce avoidable harm in the NHS by half and make public the goals and plans developed locally.

  • We have set specific targets to reduce hospital acquired pressure ulcers and the number of inpatient falls.
  • We will continue to screen for the risk of VTE and deliver timely and consistent prophylaxis and undertake root cause analysis to identify learning.
  • We will deliver improvements in the prompt identification of Sepsis and AKI and timely treatment to avoid deterioration.

2. Continually learn. Make their organisations more resilient to risks, by acting on the feedback from patients and by constantly measuring and monitoring how safe their services are.

  • We will implement action reviews for patients falling and suffering harm, and for those patients with a hospital acquired pressure ulcer to ensure timely review and immediate learning.
  • We will develop patient safety cases relevant to the most common harms to define optimum patient pathways.
  • We will develop real time dashboards for wards and department including key risks, compliance and outcomes.

3. Honesty. Be transparent with people about our progress to tackle patient safety issues and support staff to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong.

  • We will report regularly to the Board and the Council of Governors on Patient Safety issues.
  • We will engage with a variety of staff groups and skill to participate in the Trust working groups focused on specific harms.

4. Collaborate. Take a leading role in supporting local collaborative learning, so that improvements are made across all of the local services that patients use.

  • We will participate in local and regional networks to share best practice and learn from others.
  • We will work with local Trusts to develop shared care plans for patient with long term conditions and where the risk of adverse events during the healthcare episode are greater.

5. Support. Help people understand why things go wrong and how to put them right. Give staff the time and support to improve and celebrate the progress.

  • We will support the development of Problem-Based learning groups for nursing, AHPs and Junior Doctors to ensure a proactive approach to patient safety and safe culture.
  • We will promote and celebrate improvements in patient safety through submissions for national awards, regional and national and international conferences