Patient safety now: applying concepts, theories, and ideas for creating a safe environment

Table of Contents
Dedication

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Introduction

Part 1: How Did We Get Here?

What is Safety-I?

Policies and Procedures

Work as Done Versus

Workaround

Our Attitude to Error

It was 1980 Something

Personalization

Expertise

Teams

Clinical Risk and Regulation

There is a Science to This!

The 10%

An Organization with a Memory

Incident Reporting

Incident Analysis and Investigation

Global Challenges

All Change

Sign Up to Safety

Still Not Safe

Part 2: Where Do We Want to Be?

What is Safety-II?

Risk Resilience

Human Factors

Complex Adaptive Systems

Part 3: How Do We Get There?

Safety-I and Safety-II

Study the Mundane, the Ordinary

Learning From Excellence

Mind Your Language

Understanding the Impact of Incivility

Thinking About Culture

Investigating Differently

Moving Towards a Restorative Just Culture

Learning about a Psychologically Safe Environment

Implementing the 4 Stages of Psychological Safety

Improving How We Talk to Each Other

Drawing Lessons from Change Management

Caring For the People that Care

Learning from COVID-19

Over the past decade or so, we have seen a multitude of improvement programmes and projects to improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these efforts and especially those that seek to address an entire system has not yet been reached. The current pandemic has made this more evident than ever.

We have tended to focus on problems in isolation, one harm at a time, and our efforts have been simplistic and myopic. If we are to save more lives and significantly reduce patient harm, we need to adopt a holistic, systematic approach that extends across cultural, technological, and procedural boundaries. Patient Safety Now is about the fact that it is time to care for everyone impacted by patient safety, how we need to take the time to care for everyone in a meaningful way and how hospitals need to enable staff time to care safely.

This book builds on the author’s two previous books on patient safety. Rethinking Patient Safety talked about ways in which we need to rethink patient safety in healthcare and describes what we’ve learned over the last two decades. Implementing Patient Safety talked about what we can do differently and how we can use those lessons learned to improve the way we implement patient safety initiatives and encourage a culture of safety across a healthcare system. Patient Safety Now unites the concepts, theories and ideas of the previous two books with updated material and examples, including what has been learned by patient safety specialists during a pandemic.

Patient Safety Now provides the reader with a unique view of patient safety that looks beyond the traditional negative and retrospective approach to one that is proactive and recognizes the impact of conditions, behaviours and cultures that exist in healthcare on everyone. It is written not only for healthcare professionals and patient safety personnel, but for patients and their families who all want the same thing. Too often when things go wrong, relationships quickly become adversarial when in fact this can be avoided by recognizing that, rather than being in separate camps, there are shared needs and goals in relations to patient safety.