SEPT Pledges to Improve Patient Safety

South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (SEPT) announces it has pledged to improve patient safety as part of the national campaign, Sign up to Safety.

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 200 organisations have pledged support and are committed to improve the safety of healthcare through personalised Safety Improvement Plans. These outline the actions that will be taken in response to five Sign up to Safety pledges.

Our pledges for SEPT have been made available for patients, staff and carers at www.sept.nhs.uk. Our Safety Improvement Plan focuses on specific clinical areas where local data shows that improvements can be made in the following areas:

• early detection of the deteriorating patient;
• reduction in avoidable pressure ulcers;
• reduction in harm from falls;
• reduction in unexpected death;
• reduction in use of restraint;
• reduction in omitted doses of medication.

The plan can be found at www.sept.nhs.uk/safety

Andy Brogan, Executive Director of Clinical Governance and Quality (Deputy Chief Executive & Executive Nurse at SEPT, said: “By joining Sign up to Safety, we are promising all patients and staff that we are placing the safety of patient care above all else.

“We will achieve this by learning from each other and focusing on the areas where we can make care safer.  We will focus our efforts and concentrate on a small number of priority areas where avoidable harm can be reduced for the majority of patients.”

Suzette Woodward, Sign up to Safety Campaign Director, said: “Our ambition is for the whole NHS in England to become the safest healthcare system in the world and SEPT is playing a critical part in helping to achieve this.

“We are committed to supporting the NHS to place patient safety first.  Patient safety is the organising principle of high quality healthcare; only safe healthcare services are truly efficient, effective and able to offer the best experience to patients and carers. We will allow people to work on the things that matter to them and keep local solutions localised but enable shared learning nationally for others to adapt.”

The five Sign up to Safety pledges are:

• Put safety first. Commit to reducing avoidable harm in the NHS by half and make public the goals and plans developed locally.
• Continually learn. Be more resilient to risks as an organisation, by acting on the feedback from patients and by constantly measuring and monitoring how safe services are.
• Be Honest. Be transparent with people about progress to tackle patient safety issues and support staff to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong.
• Collaborate. Take a leading role in supporting local collaborative learning, so that improvements are made across all of the local services that patients use.
• Be Supportive. Help people understand why things go wrong and how to put them right. Give staff the time and support to improve and celebrate progress.