As part of the Patient Safety Collaborative System Safety Workstream, we have developed a trio of blogs to coincide with the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) going live in most organisations this month. In this blog, Natalie Davies, Deputy Director of Quality Governance at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust talks about her reflections on PSIRF and comparing it to the ‘old way’ of working.

At Stockport NHSFT like the rest of the NHS we’ve been getting to grips with what PSIRF means for us. In 2023/24 we’ve spent a lot of time undertaking pre-work to build our patient safety incident response plan, engage with colleagues and external stakeholders, including health watch and our governors to begin to share what the change in national framework means and our plans at Stockport to make sure we are heading in the right direction.

Once thing that has become clear is that there are less hard and fast rules – which can be a little scary initially but we are absolutely seeing this as an opportunity to take stock of what our patient safety priorities should be for our patients here at Stockport and the improvements we can make. We signed off our PSIRP in August 2024 and since then have slowly been working on informing colleagues about PSIRF (fortnightly online drop in sessions initially helped) and then began testing out some of the new incident response tools. After action reviews have been a tool that we’ve leant on the most so far. We’ve found these really useful in engaging team members and getting to actions for improvement more quickly than the previous framework would have allowed. Some of the quality governance team have said that some junior clinical team members seemed to require reassurance initially that the sessions were about building a culture of learning – but once they’d been a part of the AAR they came away positive about the experience.

We’ve now signed off our PSIRF Policy too, and the templates for other learning responses alongside guides for using them are available to our teams. We’ve held a PSIRF GO Live Week! At the end of March to share materials and information and we’re using 1^st April as an opportunity to put a hard stop to old SI Framework language.

Moving forward there will need to be a drive to roll out training across the organisation (no mean feat) and to begin to measure the impact of the PSIRP and new learning responses. However we’re moving forward in a positive way that PSIRF will support us to improve patient safety at Stockport.