News & Media
Sign up to Safety
We're delighted to be one of the first 12 Trusts who have signed up to the new Sign up to Safety campaign. We will listen to patients, carers and staff; learn from what they say when things go wrong, and take action to improve patients' safety.
The campaign is designed to help realise the ambition of making the NHS the safest healthcare system in the world by creating a system devoted to continuous learning and improvement.
Our Medical Director Dr Tim Craft said: "Our commitment to Sign up to Safety arises from how we put patients at the heart of everything that we do, yet we know that there will always be more that can be done to further improve the safety of care that we offer. "Our participation in the campaign reflects our willingness to have open and honest conversations with our patients, to learn from other Trusts, and to share what we have learned with others.
"A collective voice and a partnership of patient safety leaders will help to develop a more cohesive, safer national health service, building on the good practice that already exists. "We believe patient safety is everyone's responsibility and we are absolutely committed to continually improving, and helping others to do the same."
Each organisation signing up to the campaign has agreed to five pledges: Put Safety First, Continually Learn, Honesty, Collaborate, and Support. This is what we will do at the RUH to achieve each of the pledges:Put Safety First
We will:
- Reduce avoidable harm
- Deliver the Safer Hospitals Patient Safety Programme and increase links with Academic Health Science Network as the collaborative patient safety programme is further developed
- Implement the sepsis six care bundle and reduce all hospital acquired infections
- Eliminate hospital acquired pressure ulcers
- Develop a medicines improvement strategy focusing on high risk medicines and e-prescribing.
Continually Learn
We will:
- Achieve a year-on-year reduction against the national average Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio
- Use information from patient/carer stories, staff feedback, and incidents as a driver for improvement
- Learn from complaints, incidents, and root cause analyses
- Always measure, so that we can see how we have improved.
Honesty
We will:
- Develop as a transparent organisation that learns from patients – implement the complaints transformation project and continue to refine it
- Increase transparency of information sharing with patients and families, beginning with the publication of nursing numbers on wards.
Collaborate
We will:
- Involve patients in redesigning care pathways which extend beyond the walls of the RUH
- Engage with the West of England Academic Health Science Network in promoting, developing and implementing innovation in practice
- Increase the involvement of patients in research and innovation. Support We will:
- Empower and support staff
- Support innovation and celebrate success, learn from mistakes and share good practice
- Develop and deliver quality improvement courses aimed at building improvement skills in managers and frontline staff
- Build specialised skills throughout the hospital, including quality improvement and measurement skills, small cycles of change, rapid spread, collaborative models and project management
- Develop e-learning on quality improvement.