Collaborating with patients to improve patient safety in primary care

The safety of patients is a priority for the NHS, and to the NHS staff who provide patient care.  Because hospitals and GP practices take patient safety very seriously, they have many policies and procedures in place to make sure that patients are as safe as possible.  However, GP practices, and hospitals especially, can be very busy places and even though more than a million people are treated successfully every day in the NHS, things can and do sometimes go wrong.  This means that the NHS needs to be always on the lookout for new or better ways to improve the safety of patients.  One idea that has been receiving a lot of attention over the past few years is to get help from patients and their family members or carers.  We were interested to know what patients thought of that idea and what they thought they could do to help.  We started with patients in hospital and worked with them, and hospital doctors and nurses to develop ThinkSAFE.  ThinkSAFE provides carefully developed guidance and support to both patients (and their families and carers) and healthcare staff to help them work together to keep patients safe when they are in hospital.  We now want to see if ThinkSAFE is suitable for patients and staff in GP practices too.   To do this we plan invite five GP practices to join the study and to interview around 20 staff (GPs, nurses, managers and receptionists) and around 20 patients (including members of GP patient panels).  After the interviews we will hold three group meetings to discuss what people told us about involving patients in improving safety and to use that new information to adapt ThinkSAFE so that it is relevant and useful to patients being cared for by their GP or practice nurse.

Amount awarded: £61,467