Safety First, Safety Always - Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust

We are committed to learning from complaints, incidents, staff and patient feedback, the outcomes of national incident inquiries, and from examples of best practice both nationally and globally.

We use learning to continually review our actions and improve patient care.

Delivery of safe and high quality services relies upon having the right culture throughout the organisation. We have adopted a ‘just culture’ philosophy and 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.

We have already made significant safety improvements as a result of our Safety First, Safety Always Strategy (2020 to 2023), which focused on the safety of our physical environments and culture of safety and learning.

Safety remains a core part of our Quality of Care approach, which focuses on the three main foundations for delivering consistent and reliable quality of care – safety, effectiveness, and experience.

We will work collaboratively with our patients and their supporters, our staff and our partners in each of these three areas, drawing on their shared knowledge, lived experience, and feedback to help us deliver effective, quality care.

This holistic approach is shaped by what our staff, patients and our partners have told us about what quality of care means for them.

We will continue to build on the work we have been doing to enhance safety, and focus on how we use insight, involvement and improvement to create a robust patient safety culture and system, which will support our ambition to eradicate avoidable patient harm in our services.

Safety First, Safety Always Strategy (2020 to 2023)

The Safety First, Safety Always Strategy focused on seven themes of improvement.

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.

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.