Improving the safety and reliability of care across
NHSScotland
There will be no avoidable injury or
harm to people from the healthcare they receive. This is one
of
three healthcare quality ambitions for Scotland. The Scottish
Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) supports this ambition by
developing a sustainable infrastructure for quality improvement in
the NHS in Scotland while embedding a culture of safety into the
everyday practice of healthcare Staff.
The work of the Scottish Patient Safety
Programme includes projects in the following areas:
This world-leading programme is coming to the end of
its first phase this at the end of this year, making great progress
towards its aims of reducing mortality by 15% across Scotland’s
acute hospitals. A new and challenging aim for the second phase is
to ensure that at least 95% of people receiving care do not
experience harm – such as infections, falls, blood clots and
pressure ulcers. The existing aim to reduce death rates in
hospitals – known as the Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio –
will be extended from 15% to 20%.
Getting maternity care right for every woman and
baby is the cornerstone of family health and an essential element
of giving all Scotland’s children the best possible start in life.
We know, however, that not all children have that start in life –
for whilst maternity care in Scotland is amongst the safest and of
the highest quality in the world, significant inequalities exist in
maternal and infant health outcomes. Developing a quality
improvement programme designed specifically for maternity care is a
key step towards reducing inequalities and towards making maternity
care a safer and positive experience for women, babies and
families.
This is a four-year programme starting with a focus
on adult psychiatric inpatient units, including admission and
discharge processes. Within mental health services, other than for
suicide there is currently no method for reliably measuring the
levels of harm occurring. Therefore, as part of phase one the
programme will develop an approach to reliably measuring levels of
harm in mental health services. Moreover, phase one will work to
improve the quality of critical incident reviews and ensure that
learning drives improvement in day to day practice.
This project transfers the thinking and methodology
of SPSP to the primary care setting, working with GP surgeries to
identify key areas of risk as patients move between primary and
secondary healthcare services.
The high level aims are to reduce mortality by 15%
and adverse events by 30% across NHSScotland.
The Scottish Patient Safety Paediatric Programme
(SPSPP) started in 2009 and aims to support paediatric staff in
Scotland to improve the quality and safety of paediatric
healthcare. The key objective of the paediatric programme is to
reduce adverse events by 30% by June 2013 – to be measured using
the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement’s Paediatric
Trigger Tool.
