Award for NHS London nursing team’s work to improve safety
Summary
AN NHS London team has won an award for its work to improve safety for patients at London’s hospitals.
The Safety Express team, in the Chief Nurse directorate at NHS London, won the Outstanding Strategic Health Authority contribution to Safety Express for improving safety and the patient experience of care in London’s hospitals. The award was presented by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, Chief Medical Officer, at the national QIPP Safety Express summit.
Patient safety is important in achieving better outcomes for patients and is not just about reducing the number of incidents but also understanding how safety measures can be constantly developed. Safety Express is about improving care for patients by reducing pressure ulcers; falls; catheter acquired urinary tract infections and venous thromboembolism (VTE), and raising further awareness among staff of the personal and financial impacts of these four harms.
NHS London recruited ten teams to make these improvements and each team was hosted by an acute trust – consisting of partners in acute, community and local authority services. Learning sessions are held where each team reports on their progress and lessons learned and teams communicate with each other using the internet, conference calls, written updates and on site mentoring visits. Improvements were measured using a monthly audit, called the Safety Thermometer.
King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust won the award for the trust which delivered the greatest improvement, and has already reached the goal of 95% of their patients being free of the four harms in the target wards.
The next phase of Safety Express in the capital is to establish a programme for achieving harm free care in mental health trusts and residential care homes with nursing.
Vicky Aldred, Head of Patient Safety, and Nicola Clark, Patient Safety Manager, represented NHS London at the awards. The nomination, from the National QIPP Safe Care team. said: “Vicky and Nicola have shown extraordinary dedication to the Safety Express work stream, providing fantastic leadership and support with a strong focus on measurement which is such an integral part of the improvement journey. They have worked to create interventions and tools which have both supported teams and inspired innovative work.”