Different stakeholder perspectives on NHS safety

Patient safety has become an important global and national service industry with many stakeholders all keen to advance sometimes competing agendas. This is to be encouraged as it keeps the subject alive and vibrant. The downside of all this patient safety activity is that healthcare staff and leadership are faced with tsunami levels of policies and reports to digest, and must work out which are the most appropriate to apply. This creates particular problems in a resource-constrained environment such as the NHS, where busy staff are inundated with such reports and policies on a frequent basis – as highlighted by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2018, when it was already an established problem. In an NHS context, we also need to add to the problem mix the complex, fragmentary nature of the healthcare regulatory and governance framework environment that hosts patient safety work.

Patient safety stakeholders can be of an infinite variety, ranging from regulatory government departments, their arm's length agencies that carry on aspects of their work, professional bodies, international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) university research groups and so on.