Lancashire Teaching Hospitals have been shortlisted for the ‘Quality Improvement Initiative of the Year’ at the prestigious Health Service Journal (HSJ) 2021 Patient Safety Awards.
The awards recognise NHS teams who are actively enhancing patient safety by driving cultural change to minimise risk, enhance quality of care and ultimately save lives.
Patient safety is a serious global public health concern, because health impacts everybody’s lives in such a fundamental way.
According to the World Health Organisation, there is a 1 in a million chance of a person being harmed while travelling by plane. In comparison, there is a 1 in 300 chance of a patient being harmed whilst accessing health care.
With this in mind, the Trust has been shortlisted for its ambitious “Always Safety First” programme which aims to embed and sustain changes that benefit patients and the Trust’s local population.
Always Safety First is the Trust response to the National Patient Safety Strategy and has seen colleagues work together on a new approach to safety, delivering iterative, large scale quality improvement programmes across all clinical areas.
Always Safety First is a mind-set with an aim of developing highly reliable and measurable systems and processes that will prevent avoidable harms from occurring. It encourages learning from mistakes made in clinical settings so that clinical practice, patient experience and outcomes can constantly be improved. This required a transparent, responsive approach to learning and improving from any incidents or near misses.
Throughout the last 12 months we have seen fantastic contributions from teams working to reduce avoidable harms. This has led to a 50% reduction in pressure ulcer across collaborative wards, an increase from 70% to over 90% in trust compliance to Venous thromboembolism (VTE) admission risk assessments and development of new standardised international rounding documentation to support in Falls prevention and other associated harms.
Dr Gerry Skailes, Medical Director at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, said:
“We are delighted to have been shortlisted for the award which recognises the collaborative efforts and dedication of our staff members over the last 18 months to successfully implement Always Safety First.
“Patient safety has always been, and always will be, a top priority within the Trust. Having an effective and workable process for reducing harm to both patients and staff within our services is essential.
“We are committed to learning from all complaints, incidents, staff and patient feedback across not only our own Trust but across the NHS nationally to help us constantly improve patient outcomes and experience.”
The Trust will now be required to virtually present their entry via Zoom in front of a panel of judges on Monday 2nd August. Winners will be selected ahead of the ceremony, which will take place as part of the Patient Safety Congress and Awards in Manchester in September 2021.
