Safer patient initiative moves forward
Four trusts from across the UK have recently been selected by the Health Foundation as centres of excellence to make hospitals safer for patients. These are: Conwy and Denbighshire NHS Trust (Wales), Down Lisburn Health and Social Services Trust (Northern Ireland), Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Trust (England) and NHS Tayside (Scotland).
Leaders from these trusts will work with an expert team from the Institute
of Healthcare Improvement (IHI), who will help the trusts bring about
improvements in patient safety, building on the high level of commitment
to this area that each trust has already demonstrated. IHI will then
spend a further two years helping the trusts to publicise what they have
learned, in order to promote good practice. The initiative represents
a £4m investment and coincides with the launch of the World Health
Organization World Alliance for Patient Safety.
Six key adverse drug incident problems
· Lack of co-operation
from doctors (due mainly to lack of knowledge about the trust’s prescribing policy and minimal
participation in audit process)
· Lack of time and excessive work load
· No feedback from local adverse drug event leads
· Lack of understanding of audit documentation among staff
· Lack of motivation from nursing staff
· Delays in dispensing medicines from pharmacy |
Among the reasons why
the Luton and Dunstable Hospital NHS Trust was chosen as a beacon site
by the IHI include research carried out at the
trust in 2002 that identified six key problems as the main contributors
to adverse drug incidents (see panel above). This research enabled the
trust to summarise that 22 per cent of problems resulted from staff shortages
or other time-related considerations and 19 per cent and 38 per cent
respectively were due to non-compliance by nursing and medical staff.
Soraya Dhillon, chairman of the hospital trust and professor of the school
of pharmacy at the University of Hertfordshire said: “By building
on our experiences learned from [this] audit and adopting a pragmatic
approach, we expect to improve patient safety in many other areas of
hospital care.”
The Northern Ireland medicines governance project, an initiative
designed to reduce the risk of medication errors won the Health
Service Journal award for patient safety, which was presented in
London in
November. The judges, led by NHS chief executive Sir Nigel Crisp
praised the evidence-based and multidisciplinary approaches used
in the project, together with its patient-focus. In the same awards,
Mid Staffordshire General Hospitals NHS Trust won the “Implementing
NICE guidance award” for their implementation strategy that
involves working closely with primary care staff.
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Hospital Pharmacist