28th October 2024

CEO Blog: Patient Safety Principles and their practical application

How the Patient Safety Commissioner’s new principles can be applied, and how a new Harmed Patient Pathway could help.

ProfessionalsPatient safety

I hope that, like me, you were pleased to see the Patient Safety Commissioner announce the outcome of her recent consultation on the Principles of Patient Safety. The principles make good sense, but beg the question about their implementation, which is always the really hard part.

At Avma, we hear first-hand from patients about the issues they face when they or a loved one has a medical accident. Too often, that experience is poor and speaks to the defensive culture often raised when discussing healthcare.

For that reason, when we set our current strategy, a key objective was to seek to reduce compounded harm that too often occurs and adds to the physical and/or emotional pain and trauma people may already be suffering. Given that healthcare is supposed to be dedicated to healing, there is an irony that those it harms end up much worse off.

The Harmed Patient Pathway

For that reason, a few weeks ago we launched our consultation on what we call the Harmed Patient Pathway, in collaboration with people with lived experienced from the Harmed Patients Alliance.

The Pathway should complement the work being done to improve incident learning, such as through NHS England’s Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), which we hope will bring positive changes and improvements to incident identification and learning.

And whilst harmed patients want to see learning and improvement because they don’t want what happened to them or a loved one to be repeated, they need more than that. We believe that our proposed Pathway is a means to secure what is needed and remove the compounded harm we have been witnessing first-hand for over 40 years. In so doing, we believe this is a practical way for the NHS to show that it is living the Patient Safety Principles that the Patient Safety Commissioner has now issued.

Our strategic updates and future goals

Developing the Harmed Patient Pathway with our colleagues at the Harmed Patients Alliance has been full on and taken up a huge amount of time. However, I believe the results could be transformative for harmed patients if adopted and supported by the NHS and other healthcare providers.  

In addition to this work, I have also been busy over the last six months with many back-office changes at Avma. We started with the office itself, which we sold because it was no longer meeting our needs, as we are now a remote organisation. We will therefore be breaking our long association with Croydon and taking a small shared space somewhere in central London. Watch out for a change of address on our website!

And, in a moment of epiphany earlier this year, we realised that the way to improve our financial position, where we were running annual deficits, is to invest in additional fundraising capacity. To that end, we have just recruited a Director of Fundraising, Marketing & Communications to bring more rigour to that area of our work and build our fundraising capacity for the invaluable work we do, for which there is huge support already.

Finally, given our strategic ambitions to collaborate with others to improve patient safety and not accept its normalisation within a degraded NHS, we are recruiting a new Policy & Campaigns Manager, in part to replace Liz Thomas who retired earlier this year, and to give further impetus to our work.

Supporting harmed patients and future collaboration

So, as ever, it’s never a dull moment at Avma! Thank you to everyone who continues to lend their support to us and help the valuable work we do to support harmed patients and their loved ones. If you would like to contribute to our work and help us support more harmed patients, please donate.