Member Article

North East patient safety to improve following £1.7 million funding boost

Funding of around £1.7 million has been secured to improve patient safety in the North East and North Cumbria over the next five years through a collaborative approach across the region’s healthcare providers.

As part of a national initiative coordinated by NHS Improving Quality and NHS England, a network of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives will be launched today by Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health.

Led locally by the Academic Health Science Network for North East and North Cumbria (AHSN NENC), the Patient Safety Collaborative (PSC) programme will focus on improving safety and empowering patients, carers and staff to identify, and maximise on, opportunities to improve patient care.

The AHSN NENC will receive a share of an annual funding pot of around £5.17 million, approximately £344k each, every year for the next five years.

The collaborative will bring together patients, healthcare staff and other partners from across the health and care economy to determine local patient safety priorities and to develop and implement solutions to these problems.

Some of the issues that the collaboratives may tackle on a ‘whole patient pathway’ basis include reducing infections, pressure ulcers, medication safety, falls and problems with patient transfers and discharge.

The North East has reportedly established a good reputation for patient safety and a number of AHSN NENC-funded projects that fit in with the national PSC priority framework are already leading the way within this field.

Dr Susan Hrisos, from Newcastle University, talked about the AHSN NENC-funded project she is working on alongside Professor Richard Thomson, ‘Supporting Patients and Healthcare Staff to Improve Patient Safety: Developing an Implementation Package for ThinkSAFE’.

ThinkSAFE - which was developed during earlier research with patients, relatives and healthcare staff - is a user-informed approach – comprising of materials such as videos, logbooks and training sessions - to supporting patient and family involvement in improving in-patient safety.

The AHSN NENC funding will enable the team to develop a package that will support rapid, effective dissemination and implementation of ThinkSAFE across the North East.

Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said: “We have focused unprecedented attention on improving patient safety in the NHS, but there’s always more to do and these collaboratives will help drive standards even higher.

“The collaboratives also support our Sign up to Safety campaign, which sets out our ambition to halve avoidable harm over the next three years and save up to 6,000 lives. “

AHSN NENC chief executive officer, Dr Seamus O’Neill, said: “The introduction of a Patient Safety Collaborative programme offers an excellent opportunity for healthcare organisations in the region to continue on with the great safety work that is already taking place while also working with partners to spread the lessons learned and to identify and address other key areas of concern.

“With this new funding we will be able to further improve safety standards by building a measurable and sustainable system for the spread of good practice across health and social care that prevents patient safety incidents from occurring in the first place.”

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