Patient safety programme

Our patient safety programme aims to ensure that we are an organisation with zero avoidable harm by 2020. Our first target is to reduce the level of avoidable harm at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust by 50% by 31 March 2018.

The trust is committed to providing safe patient care and we aim to achieve a demonstrable improvement in patient safety culture, capability and outcomes between now and 2018, by establishing ourselves as a national leader in the patient safety arena.

The patient safety programme has the full support of the trust's board and senior clinical leadership and is made up of existing and new safety work streams, including sepsis and acute kidney injury, which are considered national and organisational priorities.

Mismanaged health care has increasingly drawn public and media attention over the past decade and high profile patient safety campaigns run by charities like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and Health Foundation have challenged the culture of accepting these errors and proved that ‘harm free care’ can be delivered.

As well as these strategic trust-wide projects, the programme directly supports quality improvement work through the support of the programme staff. It also helps staff with quality improvement through our staff education and organisational development plans.

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