MILTON KEYNES URGENT CARE SERVICES PLEDGES TO IMPROVE PATIENT SAFETY

Milton Keynes Urgent Care Services has pledged to improve patient safety as part of the national campaign, Sign up to Safety.

A patient safety campaign, Sign up to Safety is one of a set of national initiatives in England to help the NHS improve the safety of patient care. Collectively and cumulatively these initiatives aim to reduce avoidable harm by 50% and support the ambition to save 6,000 lives.

So far 300 NHS organisations have pledged support to this growing movement and are committed to improve the safety of healthcare through locally-owned and self-directed Safety Improvement Plans. These outline the actions that will be taken in response to five Sign up to Safety pledges.

MKUCS’ five Sign up to Safety pledges are:

Put safety first

Work with key stakeholders to improve patient safety and reduce harm.
Ensure the patient centred approach is embedded in all of our activities.
Actively promote a culture that is committed to continuous learning, improvement and the reduction of harm.
Ensure that patients are protected and safe through robust safeguarding arrangements.
Ensure all incidents are reported appropriately and are learnt from, and records of all associated meetings and discussions are retained.
Ensure all complaints and comments are recorded and reviewed, and acted upon where possible and appropriate. Feedback is then given via our website, in the waiting rooms, in clinical rooms and staff engagement via regular newsletters, kitchen table meetings, and regular staff engagement meetings.
Continue our work to review our processes and policies as necessary.

Continually learn

Seek the views of patients and staff on the delivery of our service via friends and family surveys, complaints and comments from patients, staff surveys and kitchen table meetings with staff.
Monitor and review incidents and complaints to identify our emerging trends and themes.
Continually review staff training requirements. Ensure mandatory staff training is undertaken.
Continue to support the training of nursing and medical students whilst promoting a culture of patient safety

Be Honest

Ensure a culture of openness and transparency throughout the service.
Provide a complaints system in line with NHS guidelines, and ensure that details are published on our website.
Ensure openness and honesty with any patient, carer or family member affected by an incident.
Be transparent with stakeholders about progress in improving patient safety.
Support and encourage staff to fulfil the principles of the duty of candour.

Collaborate

Identify other providers to work collaboratively with the service to develop and strengthen pathways to benefit patients.
Engage in joint governance with other providers to share learning from any patient safety incidents, complaints, and ideas for improvement.
Continue to strengthen links with Healthwatch to ensure the patient voice is heard.

Be Supportive

Ensure there is an open culture where staff can raise concerns.
Ensure that every incident is analysed with regards to identification of what went wrong and future prevention.
Ensure focus on positive events and progress made.
Continue to provide case review sessions for clinicians.

About Sign up to Safety

The vast majority of the care people receive from the NHS is safe, but sometimes things do go wrong and harm happens. As with any high risk industry, a focus on continuous learning about what it takes for a system to be safe is essential.

Across England, people are taking proactive steps to observe and improve how they deliver care so that they can learn how to make it safer. Sign up to Safety is a NHS-wide campaign to unite this work under a shared aim – to reduce avoidable harm by half and save 6,000 lives – helping to improve systems and empower each person to play their part in improving care.

Sign up to Safety is for everybody, in every part of the NHS whether they work in primary, secondary or tertiary care; acute, mental health, learning disabilities, ambulance or community care settings; in a national body or a general practice. We are united by our common goal; to continually strive to make the care we give our patients as safe as possible.

For more information visit www.signuptosafety.nhs.uk

About patient safety in England

Sign up to Safety is one of a series of safety initiatives launched by the Department of Health, borne out of recent reviews into safety in the NHS including The Francis Review and Professor Don Berwick’s report A Promise to Learn a Commitment to Act which highlighted the need for the NHS ‘to become, more than ever before, a system devoted to continual learning and improvement of patient care, top to bottom and end to end’.

Several initiatives are working in partnership to establish and deliver a single vision for the whole NHS to become the safest healthcare system in the world. For a summary visit www.signuptosafety.nhs.uk

If you have any feedback or suggestions regarding patient safety at MKUCS please do not hesitate to contact us at mk.ucs@nhs.net