Leadership

To ensure a leadership culture and environment that promote quality and patient safety improvement

Creating a strong organisational safety culture is a fundamental responsibility of leaders. Visible leadership activity is needed to help shape and reinforce this.

Our Leadership intervention is designed to provide highly practical approaches to achieving this through a number of simple steps that any leadership team can adopt.

How to
Case studies
Resources
Network

How to support leaders to build a safety culture

Patient Safety First asks leaders of participating organisations to begin, at a minimum, by focusing on six actions to improve quality and reduce harm.

These are shown in the diagram above.

Our 'How to' guide for Leadership for Safety provides Board members and senior leaders with an overview of how they can develop their role and responsibilities in leading a safety agenda in their organisation and actions they can undertake to achieve this. We also have available four short films about Leadership Walk Rounds.

NHS Somerset

Helen Parsons, patient safety programme manager, Janet Ashworth, associate director of nursing and patient safety, and Lucy Watson deputy director of nursing and patient safety, explain how Somerset's primary care trust is putting patient safety first.

Newham University Hospitals

Newham University Hospital NHS Trust is learning a great deal from its safety journey. Since participating in the Leading Improvement in Patient Safety (LIPS) programme, run by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement’s Safer Care team, the Trust has put in place a range of key building blocks to improve the safety of its patients.

South Tees NHS Foundation Trust

During Patient Safety First Week "Patient Safety Walkrounds" were launched. Beverley Walker, the assistant director of nursing and patient safetysaid: "We were already being very proactive at making changes but Patient Safety First Week was the perfect time to start implementing the patient safety walkrounds.

This entailed a group that consisted of members of the Trust's health and safety team, clinical matron and two corporate directors visiting a clinical area to discuss patient safety issues with staff in order inform organisational decisions.

University Hospitals of Leicester

The University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust was one of the first large acute trusts to sign up to Patient Safety First in June 2008. Representatives from the hospital heard about the campaign from networking events they had attended and since they had recently introduced a new patient safety strategy, they were keen to sign up.

Head of Safety and Risk at UHL, Moira Durbridge says: “It’s very hard for anyone who works in clinical practice not to put the safety of patients first so it was natural to sign up to the campaign when we heard about it."

George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust

At the George Eliot Hospital we have an inspiring story to tell. In 2005 we had both the highest HSMR (143) and Clostridium difficile rates in England. To make matters worse we had a funding deficit of £7.3 million. So far we have succeeded in making our patients safer by meeting set targets and continuing to reduce the number of Adverse Events (AEs).

Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Trust

"We are setting ourselves ambitious and explicit goals and at the top of the list we have put reducing avoidable harm down to zero over our three-year planning period"

Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust

"We believe our patients deserve the best possible specialist treatment for their heart and lung condition in a clean, safe place"

Conwy & Denbighshire NHS Trust

"Why are you here?” would be the usual question when the CEO walked on a ward. Visits to clinical areas followed a local crisis or celebrated a new service…or it was Christmas!"

Resources available

The 'How to' guides, and additional resources can be downloaded from here.

Title	Type	Size
'How to' guide for Leadership for Safety	pdf	148kb
'How to' guide for Leadership WalkRounds	pdf	378kb
Leadership Walk Round films	link	n/a
'How to' guide for using patient stories with board	pdf	231kb
Patientstories.org.uk video resources	link	n/a
Surgical Safety Checklist - for Chief Executives	pdf	100kb

Leadership network

Leadership intervention core team members include the following members. If you wish to contact any of the Leadership intervention team please email us.

Stephen Ramsden, OBE
Chief Executive
Luton & Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust
Dr Peter Cavanagh
Consultant Radiologist
Taunton & Somerset NHS Foundation Trust
Dr Mike Durkin
Medical Director
South West SHA
Dr Elizabeth Haxby
Lead Clinician in Clinical Risk
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust
Dr Ann Keogh
Director of Medical Safety
Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust
Gren Kershaw
Former Chief Executive
Conwy and Denbighshire NHS Trust
Maxine Power
Director
North West Improvement Alliance
Mike Williams
NHS Senior Research Fellow
University of Exeter