Why focus on Patient Safety?

Estimates suggest that between 300,000 and 1,400,000 adverse events occur each year in the NHS and that about half of those that occur in the context of inpatient admissions are preventable.  The cost to the NHS includes an estimated £2 billion a year in the extra time patients have to spend in hospital, £1 billion in the costs of associated infections, and more than £400 million in clinical negligence claims. It is against this background that the NHS has been challenged to put “safety first”.

National campaigns such as Patient Safety First and the Safer Patient Initiative have helped to raise the profile of patient safety. Together with the National Patient Safety Agency’s programme of patient safety alerts and NICE clinical guidelines, these strategies identify the evidence based practices that health professionals should adopt to improve patient safety, increase standardisation and efficiency.

However, such approaches also have in common that they are ‘solutions handed down on high as dictates without clinicians being convinced of their evidence’. The 2009 House of Commons Health Select Committee reporton patient safety proposes that empowering staff to make improvements and multi-disciplinary training about safety are essential for the promotion of effective teamwork and encouraging a change in safety culture. This philosophy is fundamental to the work we do.

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