East Cheshire, Greater Manchester

Patient Safety Collaborative - System Safety

The National Patient Safety Improvement Programme (NatPatSIPs) four programmes of work collectively form the largest safety initiative in the history of the NHS. They support a culture of safety, continuous learning and sustainable improvement across the healthcare system.

The overall aim of the Patient Safety Collaborative commission is to test and spread effective safety interventions and strategies, learn from excellence and support systems to continuously improve.

The System Safety Workstream contributes to this aim through supporting the implementation of Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) across health and care settings.

About Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF):

  • Sets out the NHS’s approach to developing and maintaining effective systems and processes for responding to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improving patient safety
  • Replaces the Serious Incident Framework and removes the ‘serious incident’ classification and threshold for it.
  • Embeds patient safety incident response within a wider system of improvement
  • Prompts a significant cultural shift towards systematic patient safety management
lightbulbs in circular motion showing the cycle

Who does PSIRF apply to?

PSIRF is a contractual requirement under the NHS Standard Contract; it is mandatory for services provided under that contract, including acute, ambulance, mental health, and community healthcare providers.

Organisations that provide NHS funded secondary care under the NHS Standard Contract but are not NHS trusts or foundation trusts (eg independent provider organisations) are required to adopt PSIRF for all aspects of NHS-funded care and may apply this approach to their other services for consistency.

Primary care providers may wish to adopt PSIRF, but it is not a requirement.

health care workers

Achieving effective learning and improvement

The PSIRF is underpinned by 4 key aims:

image showing the 4 main aims of psirf including, compassionate engagement and involvement of those affected by patient safety incidents, application of a range of system based approaches to learning from patient safety incidents, considered and proportionate responses to patient safety incidents, and supportive oversight focused on strengthening response system functioning and improvement

The role of the Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire Patient Safety Collaborative

Patient safety collaboratives (PSC) are asked to support NHS ICBs in their embedding and sustaining of PSIRF through:

  1. Implementation and socialisation of the PSC PSIRF support offer with the stakeholders listed in this specification.
  2. Support the coalition of stakeholders involved in PSIRF.
  3. Facilitate and nurture a learning culture and improvement approach by providing coaching and support to systems as they embed PSIRF including bespoke support to services that require it.
  4. Support the fidelity of the PSIRF principles as set out in the published guidance.
  5. By Q3 PSC to support ICBs to understand the patient safety themes and the quality improvement work across their system to develop a learning system and support knowledge transfer.
  6. Work with system stakeholders to identify and understand the impact of PSIRF by supporting the development of measurement plans with systems to monitor the progress and impact of PSIRF.
  7. Work with and support system stakeholders to develop sustainability plans for PSIRF.

Support Offer

We are supporting the GM system to embed and sustain PSIRF through stakeholder engagement, providing community of practice events for patient safety specialists, and learning sessions for system leaders.

2023/24 Support Offer

We supported NHS Greater Manchester ICP and providers of NHS care within Greater Manchester to implement PSIRF through a range of activities as shown in the diagram. This included the creation of a Greater Manchester Patient Safety space on Future NHS – click here

image showing activities we have done to support NHS GM ICP and providers

2022/23 Support Offer

We supported the implementation of PSIRF, key partners across the North West region who were commissioned around the first 3 phases collaborated to offer 5 events followed by action periods.  These were the NHS England recognised events for supporting implementation of PSIRF.

Resources

All resources from the collaborative work can be found here : https://future.nhs.uk/NW_PSIRF_Collaborative/Archive

 

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) webpage on NHS England

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) forum and workspace on FutureNHS

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) North West Collaborative FutureNHS

Response Toolkit Webinars

 

Blogs

Collaborative working to implement the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) Across the North West – Stuart Kaill

After Action Review and PDSA – 2 sides of the same coin? – Stuart Kaill

Swarm Huddles: Bringing together a diverse team of healthcare Professionals to rapidly assess, communicate and coordinate actions after an incident – Rebecca Williams

PSIRF Testimonials

Case Studies

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