A blog by Helen Hughes, Chief Executive
2020 has been a strange year, and a very difficult one for many around the world. Along with organisations everywhere, we at Patient Safety Learning have had to adapt how we work due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Though our working environments and areas of focus have changed, our goals as a charity have not. We continue to be an independent voice, committed to working in partnership to improve patient safety.
Through our six foundations for safer care, as outlined in A Blueprint for Action, we influence systemic change, in the UK and internationally, by:
Central to all of our activities is the hub, our learning platform for patient safety, offering a powerful combination of tools, resources, stories, ideas, case studies and good practice to anyone who wants to make the care environment safer for patients and staff.
the hub was launched at our Patient Safety Learning conference in October 2019. We have seen incredible growth of the hub over the course of 2020. To date, the hub has received over 111,000 visits, over 77,000 unique visitors, over 290,000 page views and had multiple conversations taking place in our Communities area. It offers 4,000 knowledge resources and has 1,250 members from 500 different organisations. Members come from 41 different countries, with visitors spanning 174 countries.
We are encouraged by these numbers and the continued growth of the hub. But perhaps more than this, we are proud of the relationships the hub is facilitating, the campaigns it is supporting, and the application of knowledge and improvements in patient safety that are happening as a result.
Here are just a few examples:
Jonathan Hazan, Chair of the Board of Trustees, comments:
“Patient Safety Learning is still a new organisation and it is significant that we have been able to achieve so much influence in such a short time. Much of this is a result of the effectiveness ofthe hub as a platform for spreading ideas and actions, and I would like to thank patients, healthcare workers and all our other partners for contributing to our story.”
As well as the hub, we published 38 new blogs on our website, highlighting patient safety issues, responding to consultations, promoting World Patient Safety Day and reporting back on workshops, webinars and collaborations.
We have been engaging with partners to call for the NHS and Government to act urgently and reduce avoidable harm in the following areas:
Over the coming weeks, we will be publishing five mini blogs on each of these topics, accompanied by short videos from members of the Patient Safety Learning team. Our aim with this series is to give you an insight into the work we’ve been doing in 2020, how we are making progress with our goal of improving patient safety and how we plan to build on this work in the future.