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Patient Safety

Developing an NHS patient safety culture: swings and roundabouts

We are knocking on an open door when it comes to the need to develop an NHS patient safety culture. Everybody who works in or is connected with the NHS, including patients, would agree that this must...

Reflecting on people's expectations and experiences of care

Members of the public shared how several factors need to be present to deliver care that feels of a standard from ‘good’ to ‘excellent’. The report highlights that good care builds on the basic...

The current state of patient safety in the NHS: the Darzi Report

Darzi (2024a) covers a lot of ground and issues in this wide-ranging report, which is unsurprising given the vast scope NHS activities. This column focuses on the finding on the NHS health...

Principles and collaborative practices: a roundup of summer publications

The Patient Safety Commissioner (PSC) recently published a consultation paper on draft principles of better patient safety (PSC, 2024a). The principles will act as a guide, the PSC states, for senior...

The urgent need for review, rationalisation and consolidation of NHS patient safety organisations

No doubt the final Dash report on the CQC will also find that the NHS health regulatory, governance framework, patient safety system is too complex, overlapping, fragmented and ripe for reform. This...

A professional and legal duty to keep up to date

It will be impossible for any nurse or doctor to analyse everything that is relevant to their clinical practice area. They do, however, owe patients a legal duty of care and part of this will be the...

Manifestos for a safer NHS

A fundamental question I also ask when considering election manifestos is how much control governments have over NHS patient safety culture development. Governments come and go, as do patient safety...

Global progress and Never Events

The progress report from WHO offers important insights into strategies adopted, trends, issues, challenges, opportunities and so on. This will be a key resource for all stakeholders in patient safety...

Is it right to talk about patient safety rights?

In the legal literature the subject of rights is a hotly debated one. Many legal theorists in a subject area called jurisprudence and elsewhere have debated the matter. It is a useful exercise to look...

Surgical site infection prevention bundles: a focus on preoperative skin decolonisation

Preoperative bathing is a generally accepted practice within surgery as a measure to reduce the risk of avoidable surgical site infections. Evidence to favour the routine use of antimicrobial agents...

Different stakeholder perspectives on NHS safety

An independent expert panel commissioned by the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee (HSCC) has issued the report of its findings on the Government's progress on meeting patient safety...

Changing the culture around hospital-based nutrition

The aim was to develop a wide, multifactorial collaborative approach to reduce the risk of such incidents recurring following a serious event..

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