safety
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
It was an absolute honour and joy to deliver the James Reason Lecture in 2016 at the Patient Safety Congress on what was the 68th Birthday of the NHS. Prof Reason was my supervisor for my doctorate and a source of inspiration for over the last 25 years. I will never forget the words; ‘Dr…
-
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…
-
I have mentioned (many times) the excellent series that the BMJ Quality and Safety journal published titled: ‘The problem with…’. The journal published one on incident reporting; the problem with incident reporting written by Carl Macrae, who provides an outstanding addition to the debate that the problem with incident reporting is that reporting and reporting systems are…
PATIENT SAFETY NOW 