National Patient Safety Week at Alder Hey

9th September, 2011

Patient Safety ‘It starts with Me’

Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust is very much delighted to celebrate the 3rd National Patient Safety First week from 12^th to 18^th Septembe Patient Safety week at Alder Hey - 'It Starts With Me' r 2011. Alder Hey is committed to provide patient care which is of high quality and makes patient safety a high priority. To demonstrate this commitment, since September 2008 Alder Hey has signed up to a national safety initiative in England called the ‘Patient Safety First’.

This initiative was first launched in June 2008 and is being jointly sponsored by the National Patient Safety Agency, Health Foundation and NHS Institute for innovation and Improvement. The two main objectives of this initiative are:

· To establish an NHS with no avoidable deaths or no avoidable harm to patients.

· To make the safety of patient’s everyone’s highest priority.

Alder Hey is highly supportive and strongly promotes a culture of safety amongst all health care professionals. There are various evidence based interventions or actions being implemented and tested to avoid all avoidable harm to our patients and ensure that the care it provides is of high quality and safety e.g. regular leadership walk rounds, use of the paediatric global trigger tool to study the severity and type of harm patients suffer.

The Patient Safety First Team led by Dr Theo Anbu has planned various activities for families, visitors and staff to take part in during this week. It encourages all visitors to the hospital during this period to take part in the short survey or provide valuable suggestion or feedback on their thoughts or experiences on how it could provide an optimal service to all of its users.

Our objectives for this year are

To promote safety culture across the Trust
To reduce in house cardiac arrests by early identification of children who are deteriorating and acting promptly
To reduce the number of ten times medication errors causing harm to our patients
To achieve 100% uptake of the WHO surgical check list

The theme for this year is Patient Safety ‘It starts with Me’. To support this we at Alder Hey would be taking part in a dedicated time out sessions to reflect and act on how we could continue to support and promote safe patient care.

Similarly we would encourage the patients, carers and parents also to take a moment or so to reflect on how they could support us in promoting a safer practice in Alder Hey. Please share with us if you have any key messages or actions from your reflection during this period.

For further information on this initiative please contact Dr Theo Anbu, Lead for Patient Safety First on 0151 282 4529.

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