Our Sign up to Safety story

Today we’re saying a very happy 2^nd birthday to Sign up to Safety!

Over the last two years a mighty 370 organisations, including us here at EEAST, have rallied around the campaign to help the NHS in England improve the safety of patient care. Collectively with other schemes, Sign up to Safety aims to reduce avoidable harm by 50%, and supports the ambition to save 6,000 lives.

We joined the initiative back in May 2015 - so what have we done so far?

Putting safety first by:

• establishing a Quality and Safety Strategy
• focusing the first year’s actions on cardiac conditions
• appropriately managing patients under the Mental Capacity Act.

Continually learning by:

• improving the quality and timeliness of incident and serious incident investigations, ensuring that lessons identified are completed
• shortly putting in place a Trust-wide method to celebrate and share good practice, called ‘putting quality on the map’, to support areas where improvements are required.

Being honest by:

• implementing and monitoring Duty of Candour for all serious incidents where harm has occurred
• improving the feedback provided to staff following incidents and serious incidents through the publication of investigation reports
• developing and continuing with our clinical learning publication, Clinical Quality Matters
• Creating quality and safety ‘wall boards’ and folders for ambulance stations.

Collaborating by:

• establishing a robust mechanism for sharing incidents reported by our staff relating to other providers
• working with other organisations to ensure learning across the NHS
• ensuring that lessons from serious incidents, trends in incidents, and complaints are shared with ambulance trusts nationally for a consistent approach to learning, and avoidance of repeat issues.

Being supportive by:

• establishing a mentorship and supervision process for students and qualified clinicians to facilitate continuous learning and development, which is being further developed
• ensuring the Trust has a suite of up to date and robust clinical guidelines, to enable clinicians to provide quality care.

We’re also looking closely at key performance indicators like professional update training, care bundles for conditions like stroke and STEMI, and ROSCs. We’re already making good progress, and you can read more about those in Clinical Quality Matters (page 24).

Each of you have played an important part in making our Sign up to Safety story a success so far – so today, we want to celebrate and say thank you.

Head of Clinical Quality, Tracy Nicholls, said: “I want to say a huge thank you to all of you, who support us every day in keeping patients safe.

“Since we joined Sign up to Safety we’ve seen less serious incidents, we’ve introduced Duty of Candour, and developed a Trust strategy that purely focuses on quality and safety for the first time ever.

“We’re also sharing more learning through things like Clinical Quality Matters and our annual Clinical Briefing event, and more of you are raising concerns and reporting issues through Datix. Thank you – every one of you has and continues to make a huge difference to what we can achieve.

“We also know that to put safety first we need to put you as staff first - part of the recipe for success in patient safety is to care for those that care. I hope that we can continue to work, together, to create the right conditions for safer care. Thank you for being a part of it.”

We’re exceptionally proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but there’s always more we can do! If you’d like to show your support, why not make an individual Sign up to Safety pledge? To sign up to the campaign, all you need to do is say what you intend to do as an individual, every day, to get behind each of the five Sign up to Safety pledges. Once you’ve submitted your information, you’ll be sent a Sign up to Safety certificate to proudly display in your office or station.

All those who sign up are committing to not just believe in, but to embed and be an example of the values and beliefs that make us all proud to work in the NHS. The five safety pledges are more than words on paper. They mean something. By making a commitment to bringing them to life, and by helping others to understand their role in this, we’ll be working together to create the right conditions for safer care.

Let’s think differently about safety.

Click the pic to download our Sign up to Safety: first year infographic!

Published 24th June, 2016