Sign up to Safety: another year older and another year wiser

Put safety first.

A thought that, as an ambulance service, should be at the forefront of our minds every day. But what does that look like, and how do we know if we’re doing it?

Two years ago the NHS in England set up a campaign to put safety first. The aim? To reduce avoidable harm by 50%, and support the ambition to save 6,000 lives.

So far Sign up to Safety has been supported by a mighty 370 NHS organisations, including us here at EEAST, all individually pledging support to make care safer - and ensure colleagues can discuss safety openly with patients and one another.

On the surface, you’d be forgiven for glancing at it and thinking ‘just another campaign’ or ‘why do we need this?’ After all, we know that we are all already working on reducing harm, and collectively the NHS has been for more than 15 years. But, in the words of Campaign Director Suzette Woodward,  we also know that ‘it hasn’t made the kind of impact we had hoped; patients still fall, we continue to administer the wrong drugs and operate on the wrong leg, and a patient deteriorating can still be missed.’

Sign up to Safety believes that, in part, it is because the NHS has focused on issues in pockets, rather than as a whole. So the campaign is about changing things across the board that impact on safety every day; communication failures, the availability and the design of the right equipment, inexperience, stress, attitudes and relationships, and the way we observe patients and use information.

All of those things fall under five ‘safety pledges’, which we signed up to here at EEAST when we joined the campaign in May last year:

• Putting safety first: committing to reduce avoidable harm in the NHS by half through taking a systematic approach to safety and making public our locally developed goals, plans and progress. 

• Continually learning: reviewing our incident reporting and investigation processes to make sure that we are truly learning from them, and using these lessons to make your organisation more resilient to risks. Listen, learn and act on the feedback from you and our patients, and constantly measure and monitor how safe our services are.

• Being honest: being open and transparent with people about our progress to tackle patient safety issues, and supporting you to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong.

• Collaborating: stepping up and actively collaborating with other organisations and teams; sharing your work, your ideas and your learning to create a truly national approach to safety. Working together with others, joining forces and creating partnerships that ensure a sustained approach to sharing and learning across the system.

• Being supportive: Being kind to you, our staff, and helping you bring joy and pride to your work. Being thoughtful when things go wrong; helping you cope and creating a positive culture that asks why things go wrong in order to put them right. Giving you the time, resources and support to work safely and to work on improvements.

Each of us has played an important part in making our Sign up to Safety story a success so far. So to celebrate Sign up to Safety’s second birthday tomorrow (24^th), Need to Know will be taking a look back at what at EEAST has achieved since we signed up – and how you can get involved!

Published 23rd June, 2016