Book II

Very excited to share that my second book ‘Implementing Patient Safety’ is nearly finished.

This is the second book I have written focusing on patient safety. The first book, Rethinking patient Safety documented the thinking of leading experts in safety. It was called ‘rethinking’ patient safety because while it has widespread recognition across healthcare and there have been a number of developments which provide some hope, there is a growing concern that the efforts of the last two decades have not made the difference expected. I have been studying safety in healthcare settings since around 1994, predominantly in acute care settings or at a national policy level. In my view from the present looking back at the past there are some fundamental things I would have done differently and there are some things that are blatantly wrong. The first book therefore explored the prevailing approach and focused on the work of Sign up to Safety, which was to help create a safer system and culture by focusing on relationships and how people talk to and listen to each other.

Throughout my safety career my main area of interest is to translate theory and research into practical concepts to make it meaningful and relevant for people who work in healthcare. Part of this work has led me to a place I never thought I would be in studying safety. That is the world of joy, gratitude, kindness and wellbeing. I love working in patient safety because it is endlessly fascinating and so much more than incident reporting systems and incident investigations. I want to bring back the joy in safety, dispel the myths and provide some well needed common sense. This second book, Implementing Patient Safety, aims to do just that. It documents my thinking and that of many who work in a variety of aspects of safety and beyond safety and builds on the concepts introduced in the first book.

I know I do not have all the answers and will always stay curious and own that. It has always been my belief that once we accept that we may not know how to do something or how to solve it that mind-set frees us up to explore and be open to what we find. My curiosity has led me to study aspects of sociology, anthropology, psychology, communication, conversations and behavioural insights, together with the latest safety theory; just culture, resilience engineering, organizational safety and safety II.

Over the last two years it has felt like there was something missing in my thinking, something just over the horizon but I couldn’t yet see. This view has just recently become clearer and clearer as I have grown in my understanding about what safety really is. The culmination of that is the second book.

Implementing patient safety offers a practical guide to doing things differently with five themes and lots of things to do. Thank you to everyone I have shared this vision with, you helped hone my thinking and have given me the confidence to continue. This book will be for all of those people and everyone who is ready to change the way they view patient safety and change the way they do things to make the difference that everyone needs. All I ask is that you are curious and show up with an open heart and mind.