Implementing the NHS Patient Safety Strategy

Last month, NHS Improvement (2019a) launched its new strategy to help the NHS to continue improving patient safety. Entitled The NHS Patient Safety Strategy. Safer culture, safer systems, safer patients, it aspires to widen approaches to improving patient safety and curtail situations that result in things going wrong in patient care. The strategy sets out the steps the NHS will need to take to achieve its vision of continuously improving patient safety, which centre on adopting a safer culture and implementing safer systems to achieve this goal.

Since revelations about failings in care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, where 400–1200 patients died between 2005 and 2009, the NHS has endeavoured to improve its safety record. The Mid Staffordshire scandal created a huge public outcry, and the Prime Minister was forced to launch a public inquiry, the findings of which sullied the reputation of the English NHS (Francis, 2013).