Sign up to Safety: it all starts with a conversation

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Two years ago, the Trust signed up to the Sign up to Safety campaign by making a pledge to put safety first.

But what does this actually mean and how do you help as individuals to make care safer?

The campaign is about changing the things that impact on safety every day. Things like communication failures, design and availability of the right equipment, inexperience, stress, attitudes and relationships, and the way we observe patients and use information.

These things fall under five ‘safety pledges’:

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 our 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.

How can you help? Simply by starting a conversation. It’s that easy!

And this week we’re helping to facilitate those conversations by holding a ‘kitchen table week’ where we hope to reflect, communicate and learn from harmful situations.

Not sure how to start up a conversation? Sign up to Safety’s Campaign Director Suzette Woodward has great tips in her blog which you can access here suzettewoodward.org.

Or just ask a question.

“Questions are the starting point for every conversation – the way we share what we know, find commonalities, learn something new and ultimately change things.”

More information on the campaign can be found on the NHS England website. 

Published 30th March, 2017

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