safety
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Let’s just imagine, I am back at one of the trusts I worked at, heading up safety or I am still working at the national patient safety agency… with what I know now, what would I do differently? If I had day to day responsibility for safety again, what would I spend my time doing…
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You may want to hold on as this is likely to be a bit of a rambling post. A look back I am in the 1980s. It is one of my first few wards, I am young and naive but had already fallen in love with nursing. I really had no idea I would, but…
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Despite, as I have mentioned before, a lot of enthusiasm for the concept of safety II and the mindset that it brings, there is still relatively little we know about how people can apply it in practice. A study was published in 2025 by Roos and colleagues who described how they applied a Safety II approach to…
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The conversation has shifted The last six months have felt like a significant turning point for patient safety in England. Not because there has been any major new safety initiatives, but because the conversation has shifted. For much of the last decade, the dominant narrative has been around building a patient safety movement: developing a patient…
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I had the privilege of speaking to a large group of people who work in the NHS this week. I was asked to talk on the latest thinking on patient safety and what we have learnt over the last three decades. Within that talk I spoke about the issues of psychological safety. In the Q&A,…
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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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For over a decade, the language and narrative of safety has been trying to embrace the concepts of a ‘new approach’, mainly called Safety I and Safety-II or Safety Differently. It has circulated through healthcare conferences, academic journals, and policy discussions. Influential thinkers such as Erik Hollnagel, Sidney Dekker, Stephen Shorrock and Jeffrey Braithwaite (and…
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In July, the review of patient safety by Dr Penny Dash was published. This was followed by an acceptance of all the recommendations made in the review by the government. Up until then I had not been party to what the findings had been or the recommendations so was somewhat surprised when I read it.…
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I read the review of patient safety by Dr Penny Dash [published in July 2025]. You can find it here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/686bd5d52cfe301b5fb6780c/dhsc-review-of_patient-safety-across-the-health-and-care-landscape.pdf I made six pages of notes as I read it and have a few comments as you can imagine. I think the best thing for me to do at this stage is provide some…
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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…
PATIENT SAFETY NOW 