Surgery
New safety standards for invasive procedures
Kate Woodhead RGN DMS provides an insight into the second National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures, aimed at improving patient safety. She welcomes the new standards and hopes that theatre teams will fully engage with them.
The Centre for Perioperative Care has recently published a second iteration of the 2015 National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures (NatSSiPs). The standards have been designed collaboratively across different professions, and with all four home nations and other patient safety organisations. They are a good read and should be read, absorbed and implemented by all practitioners working with invasive procedures – whether in areas of acute care or in primary care. The Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) has brought together the working group formed of patients and practising clinicians and published the resource, which they hope will be shared with patients, healthcare leaders, providers and all relevant bodies. The standards (dubbed NatSSiPs 2) are
intended to enable safe, reliable and efficient care to every patient having an invasive
procedure.1 They state most emphatically
that they are designed to make every patient safe rather than a tick box exercise to help prevent never events. They are meant to share the learning and best practice to support multidisciplinary teams and organisations to deliver safer care. The standards consist of two different but
inter-related standards which are organisational standards and sequential standards. The former, declare the expectations of what Trusts and external bodies should do to support teams to deliver safe invasive care and are what this article will focus on primarily. The sequential standards are procedural steps that should be taken where appropriate by individuals and teams, for every patient undergoing an invasive procedure. The standards incorporate a number of key principles, for example that NatSSIPs 2 set out to
achieve goals of improved patient safety, better team working and enhanced efficiency. It is difficult to see how any team or team member could reject these identified principles, as each surgery takes place; that is what each of us strives for. In addition, human factors are included, while systems thinking, culture, psychological safety and team work are stated principles throughout the standards. At their heart is patient safety and the key role of the patient themselves as a participant in safety checks.
The Centre for Perioperative Care The Centre for Perioperative Care (CPOC) is a cross-organisational, multidisciplinary initiative led by the Royal College of Anaesthetists to facilitate better care for patients undergoing perioperative care. It is a partnership between patients and the public, other professional stakeholders including Medical Royal Colleges, NHS England and the equivalent bodies responsible for healthcare in the other UK devolved nations. CPOC produce guidelines for patients and
the professions and have, for example, recently provided guidelines on the perioperative care of people living with frailty – a resource focused on enhanced perioperative care, for those who have an increased risk of adverse events but do not necessarily need critical care post operatively. They have most recently devised guidance for the management of anaemia in the perioperative pathway. Each of these resources is written in plain English and allows for up-to- date care on a focused aspect of the complex care that is perioperative care.
Standardise, harmonise and educate A taskforce that was set up in 2012 to review surgical never events, in order to prevent them from occurring in NHS surgery, concluded that to achieve a continual reduction in harm caused to patients, that we must reduce variation in practice, promote learning from our mistakes
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