Patient safety

Improving patient safety is a top priority for the NHS. In July 2019, a new national strategy was published which set out a vision for improving patient safety in the NHS over the next 10 years.

UCLPartners leads a range of programmes and initiatives to improve patient safety across a range of care settings. We also build the skills of staff to enable them to improve the safety of services themselves.

Our ambition is to help create a culture of learning that drives continuous improvements in safety for the benefit of patients, carers and families.

As an Academic Health Science Network, we are part of the National Patient Safety Improvement Programme. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are supporting rapid improvements in the following areas as part of the national programme:

• Improving the identification and management of deteriorating patients in hospital and community settings
• Improving patient safety in maternity and neonatal services
• Improving patient safety in the management of patients with a tracheostomy in hospital

We have recently supported improvements in the following areas, however these programmes are paused in order to prioritise our response to COVID-19. We expect to continue this work from autumn 2020 onwards:

• Supporting the adoption and spread of the Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Hospital Discharge Bundle
• Improving the safety of medicines administration in care homes

We also run a range of other initiatives, networks and programmes to support improvements in patient safety. This includes an Invasive Procedures Safety Network, to support the sharing of best practice in the case of patients undergoing invasive procedures. In 2019 we established an Innovation Adoption Fund for Patient Safety, offering grants to teams across the region to implement and spread innovations.

In addition UCLPartners host the London Simulation Network, working with healthcare simulation practitioners across the region. Simulation-based education involves recreating a real life task, event or experience with the aim of providing a safe learning environment to enable the acquisition of or practice of skills, knowledge and behaviours of individuals or teams of healthcare practitioners. It serves as an educational tool for the workforce in providing the opportunity for learning that is both immersive and experiential. Furthermore, it can serve as a patient safety tool in providing opportunities to identify latent errors and improve performance at individual, team and system level.