EPUT will be leaders in patient safety, advocating a Safety First, Safety Always approach in everything we do. Leadership in patient safety will take place at all levels – from board to ward, ensuring patient safety is everyone’s responsibility.
Safety First, Safety Always
Safety is our absolute priority, our ambition is to provide the best and safest care possible for our patients.
A new three-year inpatient safety strategy Safety first, safety always (2020-2023) has been developed with widespread engagement with internal and external stakeholders. It sets out the Trust’s ambition of being an organisation that consistently places patient safety at the heart of everything it does and to be recognised as one of the leading Trust’s nationally for safety.
Learning
The Trust is committed to learning – from complaints, incidents, staff and patient feedback and the outcomes of national incident inquiries. It will also learn from the best nationally and globally, from exemplar healthcare providers and other innovative and high risk sectors. The learning will be used to continually review the trust’s actions and improve patient outcomes.
Delivery of safe and high quality services relies upon having the right culture throughout the organisation – the Trust has adopted a ‘just culture’ philosophy. We are committed to being an exemplar for safety, quality and innovation – this is no less than our patients, their families, our staff and partners deserve.
More information on the Trust’s Safety First, Safety Always strategy can be found in our January 2021 board papers.
The strategy sets out how the Trust will achieve this focusing on seven themes of improvement:
EPUT is focused on creating a culture of accountability and ownership, where safety, quality and improvement is everyone’s business. The Trust will continue to pursue a working environment where staff are encouraged to report incidents and near misses and where anyone can raise concerns over standards of care.
Safety and improvement are continuous processes as is the learning that underpins them. EPUT will continue to view every safety-related incident as an opportunity to learn and ensure lessons are shared across the Trust and with partners, not just applied within the area in which an incident takes place.
Patient safety begins with a workforce that is happy, healthy, safe and equipped to do their job. EPUT will continue to provide a working environment where staff feel empowered to provide the highest standards of care.
EPUT will continue to introduce new technologies and ways of working to enhance patient safety. Recently, the Trust invested in Oxehealth’s Oxevision platform which consist of a secure optical sensor that remotely monitors a patient’s pulse and breathing rate 24 hours a day and alerts staff if they display activity or behaviour that may present a risk to their safety.
We want to engage more with partners, patients, carers and families to improve services and, in turn, improve safety.
As a mental health and community services provider, EPUT’s buildings are diverse and help us deliver a wide range of services to the communities we serve. They are central to keeping patients and staff safe and we will continue to ensure that they pose no risk to safety.
Safe organisations are built on good governance, process and access to information. This will inform actionable areas for quality improvement and create an environment of responsible reporting and intelligence-led decision making.
More information
If you have any questions or comments please contact Alex Green, Chief Operating Officer, on epunft.communications@nhs.net
Patient safety strategy