Patient Safety Reporting – the future
The Patient Safety Team at NHS England – shortly to move to NHS Improvement – have been working on the ‘new’ NRLS – the Patient Safety Incident Management System (a new acronym of PSIMS).
The new Patient Safety Incident Management System will:
- Re-engineer the current data taxonomy
- Review the way we capture data and the electronic forms and web interfaces
- Look at mobile devices and apps for data capture
- Review the way the national system is explored and analysed with specific attention to national feedback and clinical review, standardising online analysis tools and developing data sharing agreements with the other systems
- Review the way the incidents are investigated and managed
- Share learning with summative reports and statistics
- continue with the patient safety alerting system
- Develop an online collaborative sharing platform
- Provide the usual helpdesk and system support
Discussions at the meeting this week included:
- Build on the principle of locally led, data driven safety improvement
- Lever new technologies for better and more user-friendly platforms for capture, feedback and analytics
- Consider different strategies for collection (building on the call for potentially reducing the number of things that are collected or different mechanisms for different incidents)
- Review the catch all mentality – and review what is needed at a local level versus the national level – they have different purposes
- Perhaps consider a two tier system of catch all locally and triage certain incidents nationally
Recommendations from the Imperial report for NHS Improvement to consider are (in summary):
- Achieve clarity of purpose for distinct local and national systems
- Specify a limited number of incidents collected nationally and collect structured and free text data
- Make the collected national data available to compare performance and set ambitions
- Maintain existing local risk management systems and empower local improvements through the Patient Safety Collaboratives
- Conduct routine analysis and apply ‘cutting edge data mining technologies’ so it can be used by the Royal Colleges
- Apply the principles of user-focused design
- Undertake an extensive communication and education campaign to raise awareness of the importance, role and impact of incident reporting
- Articulate the benefits and track progress
- Track nationally collected patient safety incidents in certain priority areas such as primary care, mental health and community care
- Look to international best practice on patient safety information systems and share lessons globally
Lets hope NHS Improvement also take into account the lessons from Carl’s article (yes another plug!).
Patient Safety Now 