PATIENT SAFETY

Using a Systems Approach to Improve Patient Safety

Who should attend

The course is for individuals who have responsibility for patient safety in healthcare organizations, including patient safety managers and staff, clinical leads for patient safety, and senior staff responsible for clinical governance functions, including patient safety.

What you learn

Traditional approaches to patient safety in healthcare organizations are not working effectively and fast enough to make patient care significantly safer. The course incorporates the rapidly expanding evidence base on patient safety and covers:

·  changes in direction for patient safety and what is behind the changes

·  how the safety of patient care has been measured internationally and key findings

·  concepts and terms involved in a systems approach to patient safety

·  the proactive and reactive components of a patient safety programme

·  principles of human factors engineering including types of causes of failures in patient safety, including the Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS)

·  the differences between Safety I and Safety II

·  how incident reporting and previous approaches to incident analysis fail to prevent recurrences of the same incident

·  how assessing and managing risk effectively contributes to patient safety

·  how failure mode and effects analysis can contribute to proactive patient safety

·  influences in the organization's culture that can affect the safety of patient care

·  how patients can contribute to patient safety

·  how staff contribute to patient safety.

Extensive international studies that have measured patient safety and revealed the incidence and preventability of harm to patients and potential contributors to harm are described in the course. Also included are recent evidence-based practices that contribute to patient safety from large-scale systematic reviews; proactive and reactive methods for analysing how to make systems and processes work more safely; ways to measure, monitor and improve patient safety; how patients can and should be involved in reporting incidents and concerns and contributing to improving patient safety; and the strategy, learning systems, culture and support needed in an organization to make patient safety an organizational priority.

Concepts including the contribution of human factors to safe patient care, Safety I versus Safety II, the effects of distractions or interruptions to the safety of completing a clinical task, and the analysis and reliability of healthcare systems are embedded in the course. Participants practice proper systems-based analysis of an incident as well as how to proactively prevent an incident. The content in the course acknowledges — and extends — the learning outcomes and content in the Patient Safety Syllabus from the Academy of the Medical Royal Colleges.

Each participant in the course receives an extensive Patient Safety Manual that includes summaries of relevant evidence, step-by-step guidance on how to carry out effective patient safety systems, and practical work to carry out during the course.

Certificates of completion of the course are provided.