System Safety
Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire Patient Safety Collaborative
The National Patient Safety Improvement Programme (NatPatSIPs) five 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.
This programme aims to create optimal conditions for patient safety improvement across systems through two key drivers illustrated below:
To create optimal conditions for patient safety improvement to flourish
- Establish, manage and mature effective Patient Safety Improvement Networks aligned to the footprint of each ISC in England
- Support Patient Safety Improvement Networks to develop ICS level Patient Safety Improvement Plans
- Establish and manage a breakthrough series approach, to bring together teams from NHS trusts and other relevant system stakeholders
- Contribute to formal and informal regional/national learning and sharing of insights, including evaluation
About Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
The new 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
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.
Achieving effective learning and improvement
The PSIRF is underpinned by 4 key aims:
The role of the Greater Manchester and Eastern Cheshire Patient Safety Collaborative
Patient safety collaboratives (PSC) are asked to support NHS trusts in their adoption of PSIRF through:
- Facilitating improvement as providers plan to meet patient safety incident response standards
- Process mapping, quality improvement, practical implementation
- Facilitating peer to peer learning
- Capturing and sharing learning
- Providing links across a national footprint
Supporting preparation for PSIRF
NHSE have published a PSIRF preparation guide which describes a number of phases the NHS trusts would be expected to work through before they implement PSIRF:
In order to support our NHS Trusts through these phases, we are collaborating with partners at NHS England North West, Innovation Agency (North West Coast PSC) and Aqua to offer a North West Regional PSIRF Collaborative involving key individuals from all NHS Trusts across the North West. This will consist of 4 bi-monthly regional face to face events with a range of support offers in the action periods.
To find out more or get involved, please visit our PSIRF North West Collaborative: https://future.nhs.uk/NW_PSIRF_Collaborative/groupHome
In addition to details of all our support events you will find links to a whole range of resources relating to PSIRF.
For event info and registration, please click here
Resources
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) webpage on NHS England: https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/incident-response-framework/
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) forum and workspace on FutureNHS: https://future.nhs.uk/NHSps/view?objectId=32482672
