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Patient Safety

Clinical negligence: should the NHS consider a no-fault system?

‘… costs … have continued to grow at an eye-watering rate. Ten years ago, the NHS paid £900 million in damages; last year it was £2.17 billion – equivalent to the annual running costs of the biggest...

The enormity of the NHS patient safety culture development challenge

Improvement recommendations are made after a patient safety crisis, often repeated ones, but the system does not change much or at all. Errors are repeated, lessons go unlearnt. This might seem a...

Patient engagement, patient empowerment and patient safety

‘I have discovered that we need a seismic shift in the way that patients' and families' voices are heard. This requires changes in legislation, regulation, policy, commissioning, education,...

Back to patient safety basics: improving communication with patients

‘Trusts receive too many safety-related messages from too many different sources. The trusts we spoke to said there needed to be better communication and coordination between national bodies, and...

Maintaining patient safety in medication administration

Despite being a relatively new professional role, the Registered Nursing Associate (RNA) has a key part to play, working alongside registered nurses and other healthcare staff, to ensure patient...

Patient safety: why does the NHS always seem to get a bad press?

Rob Behrens, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO), gave evidence to the Times Health Commission (Sylvester, 2023a; 2023b). This was a controversial session during which the PHSO...

Female genital mutilation and a nurse's duty to report cases to the police

The recent conviction of a woman for assisting another person to undertake female genital mutilation (FGM) on a three-year-old British girl during a trip to Kenya, has been hailed as evidence of the...

The importance of NHS patient safety lesson learning

‘SO1: Make zero avoidable harm to patients a state of mind and a rule of engagement in the planning and delivery of health care everywhere.’ .

Developing perspectives in NHS patient safety

In terms of patient safety improvement practices and culture development, a recent report published by Healthcare Excellence Canada (Gilbert et al, 2023) provides some interesting and valuable...

Patient empowerment: the need to go beyond buzzwords

When we use concepts such as patient empowerment, we need to be as specific as we can about what we mean and understand about the term. We don't want the words to be just seen as a convenient ‘clarion...

We need to support those who speak up, for everyone's safety

‘Act without delay if you believe that there is a risk to patient safety or public protection.’

Martha's Rule and NHS patient safety

One issue she discusses are the professional silos and hierarchies, for example:.

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