10th September 2024
Avma and the Harmed Patients Alliance (HPA) have launched a consultation on a Harmed Patient Pathway aimed at preventing compounded harm and supporting healing following harmful patient safety incidents.
The two organisations have today launched a consultation setting out the commitments needed to support an individualised healing pathway for those who come to harm from healthcare. Evidence shows that in too many cases, the patients’ opportunity to heal is inhibited, and many will suffer additional compounded harm from the approaches taken in responding to the event.
Impact on patients and healthcare professionals
Based on Avma’s many years of listening to the needs of harmed patients and their families, and the lived experience insight from members of the HPA, this collaborative work highlights a set of commitments which, if fully embedded, we firmly believe would go a long way to significantly reducing the additional anguish, pain, and psychological harm patients and families often experience.
While this work is aimed at the needs of the patient and their family, it is also expected to support many of the healing needs of others affected by the event, including staff directly involved.
Joanne Hughes of the Harmed Patients Alliance said: “While learning about the causes of safety incidents is vitally important work, and will be something that harmed patients and families want to see, the popular narrative that ‘all patients and families want is to know it won’t happen again’ is flawed.
“When people suffer harm from safety incidents, they suffer wide-ranging impacts, and they expect those responsible for their harm to proactively seek to acknowledge the events, the impacts, and the needs that have arisen, and help restore their wellbeing as much as possible. When this doesn’t happen, the experience is a sense of betrayal and injustice experienced as wounding — the original harm is added to, often termed ‘compounded harm’.
“The Harmed Patient Pathway is intended to ensure that the response to safety incidents is as much about being just to harmed patients and families as it is about being just to staff involved or using the event to learn and improve safety going forward. This is what we have heard every harmed patient, family, and indeed staff member involved in incidents want to see.”
Paul Whiteing, CEO of AvMA, added: “For many years, Avma has received consistent feedback from those we support that having been avoidably harmed by a medical incident, the way patients’ concerns are then handled and considered adds to the trauma and suffering they have already incurred.
“We have taken all of that insight and used it to collaborate with the HPA in designing an approach for a pathway for healing that healthcare providers can use to eliminate sources of compounded suffering. We look forward to consulting with all the stakeholders to make it a success and end this compounded harm once and for all.”
More about the Harmed Patient Pathway
The Harmed Patient Pathway (HPP) is centred on the idea that care should be provided to harmed patients and families to help them heal from their experience and the impacts it has had, and that this care should be offered willingly, out of concern for the person’s wellbeing and the relationship of trust and care upon which healthcare is built
It is more and more apparent that it is unrealistic to expect that a patient never comes to harm from safety incidents; what should be realistic is that if they do, this is quickly acknowledged, and responsibility is taken to proactively attend to the wide ranging impacts on them to restore their wellbeing as much as possible. Those impacts may be physical, psychological, practical, and financial, as well as impacts on their trust in healthcare.
The HPP is designed to complement responses aimed at understanding what caused the event, providing explanations and learning, and ensure equal focus is given to the consequences of the event for harmed patients and families and to provide relief and healing too.
The pathway is not a predetermined linear pathway to be followed, rather a call to proactively listen to understand experiences, perspectives, impacts and needs, and respond to what is heard in ways that develop an individualised pathway to healing for the person, that they have had a meaningful say in the design of. It embodies both patient engagement and patient centred care.
While this work is aimed at the needs of the patient and their family, it is also expected it would support many of the healing needs of others affected by the event, including staff directly involved, also.