Author: Suzette Woodward

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 […]

My second book came out on 10 October 2019, I cannot believe where the time has gone.  I wrote my first book Rethinking Patient Safety but still had so much more to say and wanted to share the learning from the last five years working on the Sign up to Safety campaign. So during our […]

I am delighted to share the following guest blog by the lovely Amy Overend. Kindness, it seems like a simple notion doesn’t it?  A simple way of telling another struggling soul that there is love, hope and happiness to be found in the world. More often than not nowadays kindness seems to be in short supply.  The […]

Suze here… Just a quick update on what I am up to. I am currently working with the Department of Health and Social Care exploring the challenges and potential changes that could be made in relation to the response to complaints and concerns and when things go wrong.  Exploring how we might do things differently […]

Suzette here. Second book has gone to the publisher. It’s going to be called Implementing Patient Safety. I have combined the thinking of safety II with complexity science and new ideas in relation to helping people work safely. I have then proposed how there are 5 things we have to do now: Create a balanced […]