A message from the Patient Safety Team

Firstly, I hope you had a very Merry Christmas and that this letter finds you healthy in the New Year. As a patient safety team, we have spent the last year thoroughly reviewing our processes to ensure that we are improving the learning we obtain from serious incident reviews and supporting staff involved in incidents.

We have done this by engaging with you and I know that some of you will have been in direct contact with the team or have filled in electronic surveys. Your opinion is valuable in shaping the way in which we will be working in the future.

Through recent engagement, we have heard that some people who have been involved in serious incident (SI) reviews over the previous years have not had feedback following completion of the report. For this, we are very sorry.

We have been working hard to improve this situation. It is so important to the team and I that our staff trust the process and are supported adequately at what can be a worrying time. Serious incidents are not about blaming those involved for what happened; they are about supporting those staff and the wider organisation to learn from the event and prevent a similar thing from happening again to someone else.

By introducing the new roundtable approach to reviewing and learning from serious incidents, it ensures that staff members are supported much earlier than ever before and are involved at every step of the way. This is from the initial data gathering stage (timeline building), inputting to the action plan, and reviewing the final draft report before it is signed off. We are confident that previous bad experiences will not be repeated.

It is really important to me that if you have been involved in an SI investigation and haven’t received feedback or the final report, that this is rectified quickly if you want to know the outcome. Let me know some details and I will endeavour to have this feedback provided to you.

If this applies to you and you would like to understand the conclusion of the investigation and its associated action plan, please could you email your name, county in which the incident occurred, an approximate date (month and year would be sufficient) and a very brief outline of what happened, and this should enable us to find the incident. Please send this information to patientsafety@eastamb.nhs.uk.

I would also be very happy to speak with anyone who would like to know more about roundtable reviews, serious incidents, or if you would like to get involved in patient safety at EEAST. My contact details are below.

Ant Brett
Safety and Risk Lead

07715 074025
anthony.brett@eastamb.nhs.uk

Published 7th January 2021