Patient safety

The trust's patient safety programme strategy was launched during patient safety week in October 2014 and has since been further developed in line with the national sign up to safety campaign. As part of the campaign, we have pledged to:

• put safety first
• maintain organisational learning
• encourage honest transparency with patients, staff and the public
• be supportive when errors occur
• collaborate internally and externally to participate in innovative approaches.

We will measure and monitor safety using the following metrics, to get a comprehensive picture of our whole organisation’s safety:

• Past harm: this encompasses both psychological and physical measures.
• Reliability: this is defined as ‘failure free operation over time’ and applies to measures of behaviour, processes and systems.
• Sensitivity to operations: the information and capacity to monitor safety on an hourly or daily basis.
• Anticipation and preparedness: the ability to anticipate and be prepared for problems.
• Integration and learning: the ability to respond to and improve from safety information.