Clinical Excellence Safe Care Programme

The Safe Care Programme is the patient safety component of the Clinical Excellence Programme. It is led by the leader, safe care programme and the Safe Care Committee.

All individual services have a responsibility for patient safety and wherever possible, responses to safety issue/improvement will be led by services through their Service Clinical Excellence groups. However, Starship Child Health directorate requires the ability to rapidly respond to safety risks and to ensure a broad based approach is taken to investigating and solving such risks.

There are three key principles within the Safe Care Programme:

A key aim of the safe care programme is the active development of a safety culture within Starship Child Health. Our culture of patient safety focuses on prevention. That’s why we see patient safety events as opportunities to learn.

We want to encourage and support each other to report events including “near misses” and “great catches” without fear of punishment. Reporting patient safety events is through the Datix Patient Safety Management System

When we talk about a patient safety concern, we mean anything that might impact the well being of a patient. Patient safety concerns include but are not limited to:

• Medications or clinical processes that could lead to patient harm

• Faulty, unavailable or incorrect use of equipment or supplies

• Hazards that could lead to patient harm

• Security issues

Patient Safety Event Review

Sometimes, we need to review reported patient safety events, using a multi-service and/or multidisciplinary process, to identify system failures and inform quality improvement activities.

Templates are available to assist this process.

Please visit the Nursing Governance Patient Safety Committee section to find out more about Patient Safety initiatives within Starship Child health nursing.