Posts Tagged patient safety
First, do no harm
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 27/07/2009
Ever since Lord Darzi’s publication last year, High Quality Care for All, all the rhetoric is in the higher echelons of the NHS is that quality is the new organising principle (as if it shouldn’t always have been). It’s the new ‘buzzword’, replacing ‘tariff’, ‘payment-by-results’, ‘foundation status’ etc., according to the former minister. Certainly – and to Lord Darzi’s credit – it’s much more on the radar, and clinicians are more engaged than the passengers they have been in recent years.
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Patient safety needs openness, not point-scoring
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 15/01/2009
Trawling over the health press I’d missed in a week’s holiday yesterday, this headline has got to be the winner: ‘Deaths from hospital blunders soar 60% in two years as NHS staff ‘abandon quality of care to chase targets’ says the Daily Mail. Really?
A glance at patient safety in the NHS
Posted by James Gubb in Health on 14/06/2007
Improving patient safety was identified as a key goal for the NHS in the DoH report, Building a Safer NHS for Patients (2001). This built on the seminal report, An Organisation with a Memory (2000), which estimated that adverse events in which harm is caused to patients happen in an unnerving 10% of admissions to NHS hospitals (c.850,000 cases a year) costing at least £2bn p.a. The report considered around half these incidents to be preventable. A new online briefing released today by Civitas looks at how the NHS been doing since. <click here>