Meeting of Champions & NHS Partners in Birmingham - November 2008
Patient Safety Champions and NHS Partners met together on 28th November in Birmingham to discuss progress to date and share information about areas for involving Champions in the work of Strategic Health Authorities in England and NHS bodies in Wales.
In particular, we were keen to explore and develop the role of the Wider Network - over 250 individuals, or lay people and healthcare professionals already directly engaged in working with NHS patients' safety improvement.
Champions are figureheads championing the Wider Network and also Patient and Public Involvement in the NHS.
Our keynote Speaker was Martin Bromiley. Martin is "Dad" to a young family. Professionally he is an airline pilot with a background specialising in human factors.
In 2005 his wife and "Mummy" to Victoria and Adam, died during a routine hospital procedure. As a result of his experiences he has been one of the founder members of the Clinical Human Factors Group, a non profit making charitable trust who aims to advise and promote best practice around human factors. See their website: http://www.chfg.org/
Martin spoke about: Failures around non technical skills; Situational awareness; Leadership; Communication; Teamwork; Speaking up and listening. One of the ways of helping to improve safety in theatre is by use of checklists and Martin had found that by talking to Clinicians about how the airline industry investigates incidents this had helped the NHS think about system failures and how things sometimes go wrong.
After an update from Peter Walsh, AvMA's Chief Executive, on the Being Open policy and ways Champions can help address this with healthcare professionals, a discussion led to some shared thinking about future events around promoting this policy as the NHS National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) prepares for a re-launch of the policy in the Spring of 2009.
Champions stayed on after the project's NHS Partners left and shared an early evening dinner with the prospect of a very early start on Saturday morning to work together to develop questions to ask Trusts and PCTs about Being Open, for example, "how do you monitor and evaluate your Being Open policy?" and "how do you inform patients and families when things go wrong in your care?"
As awareness of Patient Safety Champions increases so does the demands on their time. As volunteers a fine balance is required between their current work/homelife and the work they undertake providing the patient perspective. Individual Action Plans for completion by the Champions, similar to ones used by the World Alliance for Patient Safety, Patients for Patient Safety initiative, were provided to help Champions prioritise their tasks and also ensure their own interests and expertise are being taken into account. The project team suggested that these could be shared with their NHS Partners to explore the tasks Champions would like to be involved in and the time and commitment they can realistically make.
We hope that people from the Wider Network can meet in the future with their Champions and healthcare professionals in regional meetings and through closer networking.
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