Sign up to Safety – Ten Design Principles
- Doing a few things well; Successful campaigns focus everyone’s efforts on a few things, doing them well and fixing them before moving on.
- Organise for impact; Campaigning, change programmes and safety interventions require organising and organisers. Campaigns are highly energised, intensely focused on buliding a campaign community, bringing people and ideas together and motivating participation and action.
- A sense of urgency; We provide information that helps people understand what we are trying to achieve with a sense of urgency, hope and solidarity that challenges feelings of inertia or apathy and facilitates action. Empowerment begins with accepting individual responsibility and with commitment. Responsibility begins with choosing to act.
- Creating local leadership and local ownership; While we have over 330 organisations now members of the campaign, Sign up to Safety aims to achieve more than numbers of NHS organisations joining. We support organisations to create their own safety improvement plans which focus on the things that are important to them. We will provide materials for patient safety improvement and local campaigning to help drive ownership of safety to the frontline. Sign up to Safety needs to strike a good balance of providing members with impetus and resources, but should not attempt to mandate or take over.
- Motivaton; As a national campaign we can help to reinforce local messages and re-energise individuals and teams. We use recognition and reward through stories of achievement by individuals, groups and organisations. We use a rhythm of activity to help focus organisations and provide an impetus for celebrating success and provide focus.
- Simplicity; We place the emphasis on the simple steps that can be taken to change practice. We provide purposefully simple tools, key messages and actions. We build on what is already out there in terms of patient safety interventions – the key focus being on helping implementation.
- Positivity; An important aspect of the campaign is positive messaging, supported by powerful personal narratives of individual achievements that are designed to inspire people.Campaigns can make a significant contribution to personal and professional growth. Participants need to be well briefed, and made to feel they are a vital part of something important, and get the satisfaction of knowing they are doing a job well.
- Clarity of purpose: Bottom up change really does work. The campaign engages people and helps them step forward, nurturing them to really do something positive for the safety of patient care but is also really clear about what role it needs to play in order to help others achieve change based on what has been proven to work.
- Alignment; We help with alignment of all patient safety initiatives and help interweave these so that each adds value to the other. The system as a whole has to be aligned to help drive the change required including; policy making, commissioning, regulation, inspection, financial incentives, together with safeyt and quality incentives and drivers. It is essential that all the current patient safety work is aligned nationally and at the frontline. It all needs to make sense to those that are expected to deliver. Adding value not duplication or added burden.
- Patient Engagement; The campaign works through a patient engagement group and others to promote the key aims of the Berwick report; ‘Patients and their carers should be present, powerful and involved at all levels of healthcare organisations from wards to the boards of Trusts’ and that ‘All organisations should seek out the patient and carer voice as an essential asset in monitoring the safety and quality of care’.
Patient Safety Now 