Patient Safety Awareness Week 2022

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Introduction

Patient Safety Awareness Week is an annual initiative organised by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, with the aim of encouraging everyone to learn more about healthcare safety. This year Patient Safety Awareness Week was held from 13 – 19 March 2022.

HCI is the leading provider of patient safety, regulatory compliance, and quality improvement support, and digital transformation systems, to health and social care organisations. We work with our clients on a daily basis to support them in implementing systems that help to improve their quality and safety of care and achieve regulatory compliance.

As part of our campaign for Patient Safety Awareness Week, we asked our Quality and Safety experts to provide patient safety tips that would support health and social care organisations in improving patient safety within their organisations.

Below is a summary video highlighting these tips.

 


Patient Safety Tips from HCI’s Experts

“Effective clinical governance has a direct corelation with positive care outcomes. In the community such governance is the greatest challenge, but demonstrates the greatest rewards. Understanding the roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, and communication pathways, of individuals, teams and committees, forms the corner stone of effective governance”. – John Sweeney, CEO, HCI

“ ‘Look externally to build strength internally’ – take the learnings from other services where patient safety issues have arisen and consider the controls required within your organisation to prevent against their occurrence.” – Oonagh Gilvarry, Chief Technical Officer, HCI

“In order to ensure the safety and welfare of all young people, it is imperative that there is regular shared learning within the organisation and amongst staff with regard to near-misses, incidents and risks identified”. – Regina Connell, Director of Quality and Safety, HCI

 “A nursing home staffing levels should be guided by the outcome of fire drills. Although dependency and holistic care needs of resident’s guide dependency levels and as such required staffing levels, this should not be the sole underlying factor driving safe staffing levels”. – Serena Horkan, Senior Practice Development Specialist, HCI

“Identify your patients using at least two patient identifiers such as name or date of birth. This helps to reliably identify the individual as the person to whom the treatment is intended for, thus helping to reduce adverse events related to patient identification errors.” – Roisin Rouine, Senior Quality and Safety Specialist, HCI

“Ensure that all patients/service users have an individual and personalised care plan, updated on a regular basis or as required when their condition changes, which is effectively communicated to all relevant staff when developed and at every update. This allows the relevant members of the care team to clearly identify the person’s needs and implement the necessary support and interventions in order to maximise their personal development and quality of life, always taking into consideration the person’s preferences”. – Patricia Fernandes, Quality and Safety Specialist, HCI

“Ensure policies and procedures are updated in line with best practice, regulatory requirements and standards. Communicate policy and procedure updates to staff members to ensure staff are educated and aware of all changes”. – Shannen O Neill, Quality and Safety Specialist, HCI

“Make sure your patients are on the same page as you in terms of their safety. For example, a nurse is aware of a patient’s post operative falls risk factors so we must ensure that the patient is educated on these risks to help minimise their occurrence”. – Joan Duignan, Senior Quality and Safety Specialist, HCI

“A positive, no blame culture is essential to enhancing patient safety. The research emphasises that incidents are stemmed from system errors rather than individuals. Therefore, we must provide support to those involved and seek learning from incidents, to improve our systems so the same thing doesn’t happen again.” – Cliona Gildea, Quality and Safety Specialist, HCI

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