Patient safety incident framework will ensure affected staff are not overlooked

At a recent development session for board safety champions in maternity and neonatal care at national level, where the focus of many of our conversations centres on safety culture, we touched on the subject of ‘second victims’. This resonated with me, not solely from a maternity perspective, but from the broader area of staff psychological safety and if, indeed, enough focus is being placed on this to support staff?

The term ‘second victim’ was coined by Professor Albert Wu in the 1980s to describe those who suffer emotionally when the care they provide leads to harm, as cited by Second Victim Support, a website supporting health professionals who have been involved in a patient safety incident. What shocked me most from the statistics was that, although figures vary, up to 50% of healthcare staff may experience an incident in which they will consider themselves to have been a second victim (Second Victim Support, 2021).