Patient Safety

Our vision is to support all our staff to deliver safe, effective care, with zero avoidable harm, to all our patients.

Implementation of the patient safety strategy will be supported by the alignment of patient safety teams and healthcare governance into care groups.

Our strategy is aligned to the emergent national patient safety strategy, which describes an aspiration that the NHS is the safest healthcare system in the world.

Our strategy has four driving principles, underpinned by openness and transparency, these are:

We strive to deliver a cultural change programme that brings together quality improvement, research, innovation, global health and patient safety specialists to become leaders in delivering safe patient care.

We will continue to promote the importance of designing safe systems that reduce harm and by providing patients and carers with knowledge of what to expect of the healthcare system.

We will continue to adopt a trust wide approach to quality improvement from ward to board, developing the capability of staff to develop skills, as important as clinical skills, to lead change, using the model for improvement methodology.

Our guiding ambition is to provide safe, patient-centred care to a consistently high standard.

To achieve this we will focus on six key areas of work:

Consistency of care
Early detection and treatment
Right care, in the right place, at right time
Infection prevention and control
Areas of frequent harm
Learning from death.

We will continue to embed the use of the SAFER flow bundle and reduce unwarranted variation, in addition to ensuring that patients receive appropriate and timely review by senior clinicians.

We will strengthen the recognition and escalation of patient deterioration by implementing NEWS2 and a new assessment for detection of acute delirium; early identification of sepsis remains a priority.

We will continue to reduce the incidence of healthcare associated infections and encourage antimicrobial stewardship. Work to reduce falls and pressure ulcers remains a priority area, as does reducing the harm caused by deconditioning.

We will refine our systems for reviewing mortality, to ensure this is consistently applied in all areas and we will learn from themes and trends so that patient safety improvements can be made.

Patient Safety Incident Response Policy: public consultation

We are asking members of the public to provide feedback on our Patient Safety Incident Response Policy

To provide feedback:

1. Download the policy

2. Respond with any comments, suggestions or questions to the author Richard.matthews@york.nhs.uk

Please note links to internal documents will not open, these are marked in orange italics but can be made available on request if required.

Our vision is to support all our staff to deliver safe, effective care, with zero avoidable harm, to all our patients

In summary, we will

Ensure that patient safety is a priority above all others
Develop staff to improve the working processes and environment
Foster pride over fear and take time to celebrate and thank
Promote transparency, honesty and trust
Engage and empower patients and carers.