Trust pledges to improve patient safety - 15 June 2016

Sign up to Safety is a national patient safety campaign to help the NHS in England build a safer NHS and address the problem of unsafe care and avoidable harm. So far, over 360 organisations have pledged support and are committed to improve the safety of healthcare through locally led, self-directed safety improvement.

Pledges for SWLSTG have been made available for patients, staff and carers here.

Director of Nursing Vanessa Ford said: "By joining Sign up to Safety, the Trust is again demonstrating its commitment to focusing on patient safety so that all patients and the staff that care for them are free from avoidable harm.

"We will achieve this by both designing our care processes so that they support safer care and by focusing our efforts on a small number of priority areas where avoidable harm can be reduced for the majority of patients. Every employee can contribute to safer patient care, even those who don't work on the wards. We all have a role to play in improving patient safety."

Suzette Woodward, Sign up to Safety Campaign Director, said: "Our ambition is to help organisations and individuals working across all healthcare settings in the NHS in England to provide the safest possible care to their patients and SWLSTG is playing a critical part in helping to achieve this.

"We are committed to supporting SWLSTG to focus specifically on patient safety. Patient safety is the organising principle of high quality healthcare since only safe healthcare services are truly efficient, effective and able to offer the best experience to patients and carers. We challenge ourselves and our members to question everything and re-think patient safety in order to consider what could be done differently to create longer lasting change. We help people work on the things that matter to them but encourage them to share their learning nationally for others to adapt."

The five Sign up to Safety pledges are:

• Put safety first - Committing to reduce avoidable harm in the NHS by half through taking a systematic approach to safety and making public your locally developed goals, plans and progress. Instil a preoccupation with failure so that systems are designed to prevent error and avoidable harm
• Continually learn - Reviewing your incident reporting and investigation processes to make sure that you are truly learning from them and using these lessons to make your organisation more resilient to risks. Listen, learn and act on the feedback from patients and staff and by constantly measuring and monitoring how safe your services are
• Be honest - Being open and transparent with people about your progress to tackle patient safety issues and support staff to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong
• Collaborate - Stepping up and actively collaborating with other organisations and teams; share your work, your ideas and your learning to create a truly national approach to safety. Work together with others, join forces and create partnerships that ensure a sustained approach to sharing and learning across the system
• Be supportive - Be kind to your staff, help them bring joy and pride to their work. Be thoughtful when things go wrong; help staff cope and create a positive just culture that asks why things go wrong in order to put them right. Give staff the time, resources and support to work safely and to work on improvements. Thank your staff, reward and recognise their efforts and celebrate your progress towards safer care.