THIS Institute supports evaluation of new roles in patient safety
One of the challenges facing the NHS right now is keeping patients safe. As part of its NHS Patient Safety Strategy, NHS organisations in England introduced two new roles:
- the patient safety specialist, a staff member dedicated to leading work to ensure that patients treated in their organisation are safe, and coordinating efforts to improve safety.
- the patient safety partner, a patient, family member or other member of the public who adds their unique perspective to an organisation’s efforts to manage and improve safety.
Establishing the roles requires significant investment but they haven’t been evaluated yet. Working with patients, carers, members of the public, and patient safety specialists and patient safety partners themselves, we will look at how well these two new roles are working and what could be improved. This will help NHS leaders to develop and support these important roles in the future.
These two new roles present great opportunities to advance patient safety across the NHS – from community care to highly specialised hospitals – and recognise the vital contributions offered by specialised expertise and experiential knowledge to improving safety. Our evaluation will examine how the roles work in a range of settings and generate insight into how they are evolving through time. It will provide crucial insight into how to optimise the roles and the contribution they can make to patient safety.”
Graham Martin, Director of Research at THIS Institute
We are very pleased to work with a fantastic team of colleagues and collaborators to understand how the patient safety specialist and partner roles are being implemented in various organisations providing NHS care. We’ll be able to see how well the two roles work in tandem and where they make a difference.”
Robert Pralat, Research Associate at THIS Institute