World Patient Safety Day takes place this year on Sunday 17th September and Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Patient Safety Team will be raising awareness and celebrating the day ahead of the occasion from Monday 11th to Friday 15th.
This year’s theme of “Engaging patients for patient safety” is a key priority area of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy and runs parallel with the implementation of involving patients in patient safety, particularly the introduction of Patient Safety Partners. Patient Safety Partners (PSPs) are new and evolving roles developed by NHS England to help improve patient safety across health care in the UK. PSPs can be patients, carers, family members or other lay people (including NHS staff from another organisation).
A key message from this year’s World Patient Day campaign is to promote the ‘Simple steps to keep you safe during hospital stay’. A video will be made available via YouTube and leaflets will be available for staff, patients and their families at our various stands that will be held at the following locations:
- Thomas Linacre Centre, Parson’s Walk, Wigan - Monday 11th September 2023 (from 9am)
- Leigh Infirmary - Wednesday 13th September 2023 (from 9am)
- Wrightington Hospital - Thursday 14th September 2023 (1pm-4pm)
Recently, NHS England published the new Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) outlining how NHS organisations should respond to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improvement. This represents a significant shift in the way the NHS responds to patient safety incidents and focusses on raising awareness of the need for active engagement of patients, their families, and carers and to empower them to be actively involved in their healthcare and the improvement of safety. PSIRF outlines how NHS organisations should respond to patient safety incidents to help promote learning and improvement and, for organisations like ours it means we’ll be identifying our top safety themes and how we can learn from these and make improvements for the future.
Our Patient Safety Team is made up of several different professionals who work in the realms of patient safety. Led by Associate Director of Governance and Patient Safety, Ehsan Haqqani, who co-ordinates and strategically leads the Trust's patient safety and clinical effectiveness agenda the team includes Head of Patient Safety, Patient Safety Manager, Medical Device Safety Officer, Sepsis Lead Nurse, Acute Kidney Injury Lead Nurse, Datix (Risk Management Information System) Administrators and Governance Administrators. This team reports directly into the Chief Nurse and Medical Director who are members of the Board of Directors, ensuring that Patient Safety is a top priority for the Trust.
The team focusses on all aspects relating to improving patient safety whether this be reporting or responding to day-to-day incidents, promoting good practice within the Trust, both internally and externally, or by using preventative tools to ensure the safety of our patients. In line with our Trust ethos, we are committed to delivering safe personalised and compassionate care, leading to excellent outcomes and patient experience.