The Celebration Event for Leading for Patient Safety
By Martine Price, Clinical Lead Nurse, Improvement Cymru.
On 9 June, our Leaders for Safety attended a celebration event as they completed Leading Patient Safety. The programme was delivered in partnership with Improvement Cymru and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). It began in March with 38 participants, all senior leaders from across all health boards and trusts in Wales. The roles of people in the group include Assistant/Deputy Directors of Nursing, Therapies and Medicine, Consultants, Quality and Safety Leads. An amazing group all of whom have key roles for quality and safety in their organisations.
Improvement Cymru is the improvement service for NHS Wales, our aim is to support the creation of the best quality health and care system for Wales so that everyone has access to safe, effective, and efficient care in the right place and at the right time across the whole care system. On behalf of NHS Wales, we have partnered with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to create the Safe Care Partnership with health boards and trusts across Wales.
The aim of the Safe Care Partnership is to provide nationally coordinated, locally delivered support for safe reliable and effective care. It will support national collaboration and cross boundary learning. Each health board or trust’s leaders and teams will build upon current work and strengthen improvement capability to establish their systems for highly reliable and safe care.
The Safe Care Partnership comprises of four activities: Leading for Patient Safety, Foundational Site Visits of all health boards and trusts over this summer, Coaching for Patient Safety and the Safe Care Collaborative. Leading Patient Safety was the first step towards the Safe Care Collaborative. It was designed to develop a patient safety clinical leaders’ network for NHS Wales. These leaders will act as sponsors for patient safety throughout the Partnership and hold a key role in quality and safety within their health board or trust.
Over a series of workshops led by an expert faculty the participants have learnt the foundations of creating systems for safety. Using the practical Framework for Safe, Reliable and Effective Care to improve patient safety continuously and reliably. The group have shared and learnt together and are now equipped to lead and influence improvement work and create the culture and conditions for improvement to flourish.
Efforts to improve the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of health care are not new; organisations have been working toward these goals for years. However, often various strategies are taken forward in a vacuum, not fully appreciating how different approaches and initiatives impact one another. The Framework for Safe, Reliable, and Effective Care is the basis of the programme and our partnership with IHI. The framework is made up of two foundational domains, culture, and the learning system, along with nine interrelated components, with patients and families at the core. It brings together, succinctly and in one place, all the strategic, clinical, and operational concepts that are critical to achieving safe, reliable, and effective care.
We are delighted that our delegates have graduated from the Leading for Patient Safety programme and have been so impressed with their knowledge, skills, energy, and motivation to share and learn together. This network of leaders will be pivotal to taking Safe Care Together forward and all of us from Improvement Cymru and the IHI are excited and feel fortunate to be working with this talented group of leaders.
Here are some of the comments the attendees made on the day:
“Working together as a system to take forward improvement across Wales.”
“Graduation day for our programme, our journey of improvement starts here.”
“Made me think differently, my role as a leader, creating the environment for quality.”
“Building a network all aligned to the Framework for Safe, Reliable and Effective Care.”
We are now moving towards the next activity: to develop local patient safety coachesto work with the sponsors (Leading Patient Safety) to support teams through the Safe Care Collaborative.
We are now open for applications from within your organisation for the Coaching for Patient Safety programme. Please contact me for more details Martine.Price@wales.nhs.uk