Author: Suzette Woodward

Now is the time to turn theory into reality.  Over the last five years I have been studying and writing about new approaches to safety.  I have set that out in both my books and in particular my second book below.  It has also been reiterated and explored by a growing number of patient safety […]

The following is a guest blog by Dr David Naylor* Over the past few nights, I have had a recurring dream.  I am the captain of a huge new aircraft carrier. My officers, two women, are on the deck. All I feel is that I have no idea what I am doing. I am wandering […]

There is a lot of talk about compassionate leadership. What does it actually mean? Start with listening. Be empathetic, kind, humble and human. Ask people what they need. Be curious and don’t assume you need to have all the answers. Seek diversity of people and opinions to help find the solutions. Help people be the […]

Imagine a range which has at one end the status quo i.e. the way in which we continue to do the same thing time and time and time again (I’m talking safety wise, incident reporting, incident investigations, focus on error, harm and failure etc) and at the other end is ‘change’ or ‘innovation’ or ‘improvement’ […]

The tools and methods for safety I seem clumsy and out of sync with the world we find ourselves in. Incident reporting and root cause analysis have long been both the methods of choice and the wrong way to learn. Over the next few months let’s explore better methods for learning. Let’s use this time […]

Julia Unwin says the time is for us to notice what is happening now in order to learn from it for the future. The study of how people and systems are able to succeed within complex adaptive systems and constant changing dynamics is really important right now.  Complexity forces us to consider the dynamic properties […]

For those of you who think you are doing nothing by staying at home. By doing so you are supporting everyone else, you are not putting yourself and others at unnecessary risk.  You are doing something very special. For those of you who are working from home for all sorts of reasons.  You are doing […]

When I started out in the NHS I could never have imagined where my career would take me.  Over 40 years later I have had the most wonderful career both as a clinician and as a patient safety specialist which has taken me all over the world and to meet the most fantastic people along […]

My mum and I spent a small fortune one year in buying online what we considered were the most beautiful plants for her garden.  They arrived tiny and frail but full of promise, we had even proudly drawn up a garden design for where they would go in the particular border we wanted to improve. […]

The Implementing Patient Safety blog series Part one describes the growing sense of unease about the way we do safety in healthcare and how we can do it differently. It describes the dominant approach to patient safety in healthcare we use today – which has been coined by some as Safety I. Patient safety is […]