leadership
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Suzette Woodward I often get asked how can we measure whether we are safer today than we were yesterday. I suspect that this is often with the desire for me to provide a small number of clever measures that would clearly show whether safety has improved or not. This is so much harder than people…
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In reality we do not know what the true quantitive level of safety is. We dont know for sure how many things are going wrong and we definitely dont know how many things go right. I would argue we may never know. We cannot capture everything – that would be impossible. What we do capture…
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In many ways the year 2000 was the start of the safety movement as we know it today. There are many safety scholars out there who will cite the work as far back as the late 1800s that helped our thinking in patient safety and the brilliance of our anaesthetic colleagues who were in fact the…
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Wherever you work in healthcare and whatever role you have you will be wanting to ensure the safety of the patients in your care. You will want to find ways of building safety within your work. However, healthcare is an uncertain world and the difference between safe care and unsafe care can be decided in minutes. Over the…
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People “tend to overestimate their ability to function flawlessly under adverse condition, such as under the pressures of time, fatigue or high anxiety” and “We must re-examine all that we do and redesign our many and complex systems to make them less vulnerable to human error” Two quotes from an editorial in the BMJ from 18…
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I have been working with loads of amazing people both here and abroad over the last year. One of the many things that comes up time and time again is measurement: ‘how do we measure success when it comes to patient safety?. The questions we have are challenging to answer with confidence; how safe are we today?…
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In the intricate world of healthcare, where patient safety is paramount, the ability to speak up is a crucial component of a culture of safety. However, the complexities surrounding voicing concerns or challenging the status quo in a healthcare environment can be extremely daunting. Speaking up to those who are respected, who are perceived as more…