KEEPING STAFF & PATIENTS SAFE
“For instance, in Yorkshire & Humber AHSN there is a big focus on reducing falls in hospitals, in Greater Manchester AHSN there is a focus on medicine safety, in other areas there will be a focus on reducing pressure ulcers, and that is why these are so important and locally-led,” said Fairman. “This is a real way in which these local priorities can be influenced.”
In the north west, Dr Mear noted that from the ‘menu of choice’ options the Collaborative partners sat down and worked through what, as a region, they thought were the most important issues based on what they knew about the area.
“For example, one of our big programmes will be optimising medicines,” she said. “We are looking at electronic software that monitors what medicines are being prescribed, but also how we train staff on the frontline to administer as well to make sure they don’t make errors.
“We’re also working with a company called Proteus, which has developed an ingestible sensor tablet. So, when a patient takes their medication they also take a benign tablet with a little sensor in it and that can let the carer and doctor, via a patch you put on your stomach, know that you are taking the right medicine at the right time or not – so it can be adjusted accordingly.”
Measurement
With regards to measuring safety and improvements, Dr Mear stated that any changes need to be measured over time. And, initially, the AHSNs need to set baselines in their areas of focus. She noted that some people already have these in place whereas others, like the North West Coast AHSN, have commissioned work to establish the baseline.
“For us, on the medicines optimisation, we want to cut medication errors and we can get a baseline about errors now and how we want to increase compliance of service users taking their medication and of providers in the future,” said Dr Mear. “We commissioned
Discussing the funding, Dr Mear said that money will be spent on developing leadership and training staff on the frontline.
“There is other spend about bringing groups of people together,” she added. “For example, if you have a lot of medical optimisation professionals and you want them to share good practice and learn from each other you need a coordinating role pulling them together and helping them to understand how to do this in practice.
“There is also the cost in setting up the baseline measurements, and oversight of the programme is quite a big task. We have come
an organisation called Haelo in the north west, and their speciality is measurement of health- related outcomes, to help find the baseline. Once this is established, our work will be about trying to proactively prevent harm from happening.”
Supporting role
NHS IQ and NHS England will provide a ‘supporting’ role to the Collaboratives and AHSNs, helping in some of the more technical issues such as measuring improvement in safety or helping to share the learning and good practice developed by each AHSN.
Fairman called this a very “hands-off” national programme compared to many that have gone before.
“We’re not there to get in the way,” he noted. “As part of our work, though, we’re going to try to bring together the local results into a national picture, so that Jeremy Hunt and other ministers have a coherent picture of what is happening on safety rather than having 15 regional pictures.”
The Collaboratives will be funded by NHS England at £12m a year for the next five years. However, only £5.17m was allocated for 2014- 15 across the AHSNs as partial year funding.
a long way in the last few years with regards to patient safety, but how can we make it even safer.”
On top of this, the 15 AHSNs work very closely meeting on a bi-monthly basis to share good practice and lessons learned. But Dr Mear noted that because of the ‘menu of choice’ some AHSNs will be focusing on the same areas. In order to coordinate this activity nationally NHS IQ will pull together cluster groups around the choices. For instance, those looking at acute kidney injury will meet to look at who is doing what, how they measure and benchmark against each other and how to share best practice.
Sign up to Safety
The programme also supports the aim of the ‘Sign up to Safety’ campaign to make the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world by creating a system devoted to continuous learning and improvement. Fairman added: “The Collaboratives and Sign up to Safety are seamlessly joined at the top, but locally what will happen is that with the Sign up to Safety campaign, each individual organisation is being asked to sign up to two national and two local priority areas. What will then happen, effectively, is that they will sign up to areas that are being covered in their local safety Collaboratives. They will be very closely joined and they will support each other to enhance the value of each.”
Steve Fairman FOR MORE INFORMATION
W:
www.nhsiq.nhs.uk/improvement- programmes/patient-safety/patient-safety- collaboratives
national health executive Nov/Dec 14 | 77
Dr Liz Mear
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