This page covers some current items in our policy work programme:
- Dealing with the downturn
- How does your board know that patient safety is a priority in your trust?
- Avoidable harm
- Regulatory reform
Quality, safety and dealing with the downturn
The health service has enjoyed a decade of care improvement, growth and learning started under the framework of the NHS Plan (2000). The NHS Confederation welcomed Lord Darzi's report High Quality Care for All (2008), which placed safety at the heart of the quality agenda. We do understand our members face a major challenge in improving clinical and service quality while controlling costs. Financial issues are coming to the forefront of our members' concerns. This is an important issue for NHS management and you can read about our work programme to support members on our Dealing with the downturn page.
How does your board know that patient safety is a priority in your trust?
NHS boards play a key role in ensuring the care given within their organisations is safe and risks are reduced. However for non executive directors (NEDs) in particular, it is not always easy to know what questions to ask to get the real picture. A series of NHS Confederation workshops for non executive directors in November 2009 featured workshops for each of the different healthcare sectors and built on new patient safety fact sheets which list the questions every board member should ask about patient safety. Is your board using these and are they helpful?
A number of resources are also available from other organisations, including:
Avoidable harm
High Quality Care for All seeks to build on existing patient safety initiatives, many premised in Safety First and emphasises that the patient environment should be clean and safe and avoidable harm should be reduced (e.g. medication errors and HCAIs).
Safety First indicated that one in ten patients admitted to hospitals in developed countries will be unintentionally the victim of an error and that around half of these events could have been avoided if lessons from previous incidents had been learned. In essence the same errors and system failures are often repreated.
In our work with the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA), we advocate a systemic approach to preventing, analysing and learning from errors as essential to embed changes for patient safety.
Regulatory reform
The current reform of professional and system regulation has the issue of quality and patient safety as its core. The NHS Confederation is engaging with the Department of Health and Care Quality Commission and represents member views on the development of the new regulatory systems. This is an important issue for NHS management and you can read about our work programme to support members on our Regulation pages.