Keeping our patients safe at #TeamKGH

Keeping patients safe and protecting them from avoidable harm

All our patients rightly expect to be treated in a safe environment and be protected from avoidable harm at all times.
 
Everyone in the NHS works extremely hard to achieve this but when mistakes happen and things go wrong it can have devastating consequences for the people we are caring for.
 
Understanding patient safety means we are constantly alert to the risks and how they arise and we do everything we can to avoid unintended or unexpected harm. Everyone at #TeamKGH has a role to play as we work to provide even better care for our community.
 

Listening to our patients and our staff to drive improvements

As well as getting the basics right, such as maintaining high standards of infection prevention and control and reducing medication errors, we need to further develop the way we learn – not just from when things go wrong but also when things go well.
 
We also need to listen to feedback from patients, recognising that hearing about their care and experiences – both good and bad – will help us improve.
 
And we must listen to each other – encouraging staff to raise ideas about safety improvements at #TeamKGH and responding to feedback. We know that the better engaged our workforce is, and the more they feel they have a say over life at #TeamKGH, the more efficient, effective and safe they are.
 
We have many ways for staff to raise issues, bring forward ideas and hear about patient experiences (and those of their relatives and carers) that could directly, or indirectly, affect safety and the care they receive.
 
These include:
  • Our Patient Safety Learning Forum, which ensures lessons from patient safety incidents are shared more widely across #TeamKGH
  • Listening to compliments and complaints and patient feedback about patient experience through our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS); results of the Friends and Family Test (where patients are asked if they would recommend our services to their friends and families); and the responses to national surveys
  • Staff speaking to their line managers about incidents or colleagues’ behaviour that they feel could affect patient safety and, if they do not feel they can do this, raising issues with our Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) Guardian or one of their team of FTSU champions from across #TeamKGH
  • We have five Maternity Safety Champions supporting our culture of safety and openness fostering a culture where staff have a desire to learn from incidents and investigations.
Engagement and involvement are playing a key role in our improvement journey with a growing team of QSIR practitioners (Quality, Service Improvement and Redesign). They are able to combine their shopfloor knowledge with training to help staff implement their own ideas. This is a key part of our quality improvement work and we already have more than 300 projects completed, under way or being considered.
 
Find out more about how we are working hard to ensure we listen to our patients and our Continuous Quality Improvement work 

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