EPUT and MASS work together in drive for continuous learning and safety improvement

Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) is working with MASS, an innovative technology company which works with public sector organisations and businesses in the UK and globally, to enhance how it learns lessons from incidents and shares good practice to improve care.

EPUT is a large and complex organisation. It provides community health, mental health and learning disability services to support more than 3.2 million people living across Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire and Luton. Over 5,500 staff work across more than 200 sites and provide services in people’s homes and in community settings.

Large organisations can face challenges in capturing, analysing and sharing lessons effectively across their workforce to improve future performance. The MASS Lessons Support Team includes experts with decades of experience working with other complex organisations such as the Ministry of Defence, Public Health England and NATO to implement processes for sharing learning.

Moriam Adekunle, Director of Safety and Patient Safety Specialist at EPUT, said: “Providing high quality, compassionate care is our number one priority. As a learning organisation we are committed to continuously driving forward improvements to patient safety not just for now, but for the future too.

“If an incident takes place in one location, we need to make sure what we have learned is cascaded to all areas so we can avoid something similar happening again in another location.

“We must look at our systems and processes to ensure they are robust and will prevent a similar incident happening again and track where change has been implemented so we can ensure learning has been embedded across the organisation. We are creating an EPUT Culture of Learning.”

MASS is working closely with EPUT staff to develop a new EPUT Safety and Lessons Management System (ESLMS).

The ESLMS will allow EPUT to analyse and interpret data relating to incidents, including data from a range of sources including patient records, ward quality and risk profiles from assurance visits and incident reports. It will enable the EPUT Lessons Team to develop action plans to address issues raised and ensure that these lessons are communicated across the organisation. The system will also allow the Trust to disseminate safety learning and other crucial information across its 200 sites.

MASS has also trained the EPUT Lessons Team so they feel confident using the new system and can train other colleagues to use it too.

Steve Townsend, Group Head of Training Support at MASS, said: “Organisations can only build an effective learning culture by having an effective knowledge management system. Capturing, analysing and learning from previous experiences is vital for future success for any organisation.

“This is particularly the case in the healthcare industry. The knowledge and expertise that our team can share with the Trust can help them to continually improve their quality of care, which will have tangible benefits to those living and using these services across Essex, Suffolk, Bedfordshire and Luton.”