Patient Safety Learning believes that health and social care organisations need to have standards for patient safety. These can inform 'what good looks like' and enable organisations to self-assess against them.
Standards provide a framework for prioritising and developing transformational change programmes to ensure patient safety is a core purpose.
Those Standards now exist.
(Source: World Health Organization, Patient Safety, 13 September 2019. who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/patient-safety)
Organisations are legally required to take ‘all reasonable and practical steps’ to improve safety. Yet, these WHO-sourced figures evidence a failure in this ambition.
One of the primary reasons for such shocking statistics is that organisations don’t have standards for patient safety in the way they do for other safety issues. Those that they do have are insufficient and inconsistent.
Patient Safety Learning believes that all health and social care organisations must have access to comprehensive patient safety standards that they can adopt and implement to meet their legal and moral obligations. Doing so would deliver the following benefits:
- safer, quality patient care, consistently delivered
- an assurance that patient safety sits at the organisation’s core
- demonstration of leadership and organisational commitment
- improved governance via a strengthened risk management system and approach
- improved performance through the delivery of greater efficiencies and increased effectiveness
- the ability for patients and families, funders and communities to identify and differentiate good safety providers
- reassurance to regulators.