The safety of the people in our care is our highest priority. This page explains more about how we are trying to always improve in terms of patient safety.
Keeping patients safe
We try to keep patients safe wherever possible, through:
- Staff training - there is mandatory training for all our clinical staff in patient safety and in using the least restrictive practices, and for all Trust staff in speaking up (see below)
- Safety planning - working with patients and their carers to understand how to keep them safe and well
- Involving carers - we are accredited through the Carers Trust's Triangle of Care scheme
- Effective systems and sharing of information - all our services use electronic patient records, and information is shared with GPs and other health professionals where appropriate
- Medication management - we have an internal Pharmacy team supporting our psychiatrists and others who prescribe medication, and we advise patients on the safe management of medicines
- Speaking up - we have a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian and Freedom to Speak Up Champions across our services, to encourage colleagues to raise any concerns they may have about patient safety. All colleagues receive training on the importance of speaking up - either internally or to outside bodies like the Care Quality Commission (CQC), our regulator
- Developing open cultures - we are working hard to ensure that all our wards have open cultures where colleagues can challenge each other in a positive and constructive way.
The CQC monitor how safe our services are and you can read about their assessment in the reports on the CQC website.
Learning and improving
If something goes wrong, or if there is a near miss, we are committed to learning lessons and making improvements.
We were one of the first NHS trusts to adopt the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, part of the national NHS Patient Safety Strategy.
Read our Patient Safety Incident Response Plan.
