NHS introduces new patient safety agency

The National Patient Safety Agency.

T he National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) is a Special Health Authority formed in 2001 to improve patient safety in the NHS across England and Wales. Currently, it has a budget of just over £15 million. The NPSA was created following the publication of two key reports by the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, An organisation with a memory and Building a safer NHS. An organisa...

How well do NHS trusts react to patient safety alerts?

The study, first published in 2007, used several methods to study the nature of patient safety alerts, find out how trusts received and implemented them, assessed their impact and recommended improvements. Methods included surveys and interviews of staff at different levels from 41 NHS organizations and an in-depth study of 11 alerts.

Pathobiology introduces a new category.

Disturbing the Doxa of Patient Safety; Comment on “False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice”

In a recent edition of this journal, Mannion and Braithwaite provide a succinct analysis of the emergence, and ultimately limited impact, of what they term the current ‘Safety I’ movement in healthcare. They describe the arc of this field from denial, through engagement via mechanisms and approaches imported from other industries, to the current situation where, despite ‘best efforts,’ error ra...

The Rise of Patient Safety-II: Should We Give Up Hope on Safety-I and Extracting Value From Patient Safety Incidents?; Comment on “False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice”

Who could disagree with the seemingly common-sense reasoning that: “We must learn from the things that go wrong.”? Despite major investments to improve patient safety, relatively few evaluations demonstrate convincing reductions in risk, harm, serious error or death. This disappointing trajectory of improvement from learning from errors or Safety-I as it is sometimes known has led some research...