Hospital Pharmacist
Vol 11 No 6 p222
June 2004

News summary

NPSA toolkit targets staff suspensions

Unnecessary suspensions from work following a patient safety incident are being targeted with a toolkit produced by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA). The National Audit Office identified occasions where staff were excluded from work despite evidence of systems failures rather than individual shortcomings. NPSA joint chief executive, Susan Williams, said, “All too often in the past the immediate response to an error in the NHS has been to blame the member of staff involved and to ignore the underlying causes. An automatic decision to blame and suspend staff makes it more likely that errors will be covered up and that the right lessons will not be learned.”

The NPSA toolkit is interactive and designed for NHS managers dealing with staff involved in an incident. It is available here