Central to our work in transforming health services and systems is our award-winning support for improving patient safety.
This is delivered by the West of England Patient Safety Collaborative, one of 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives across the country, each hosted and coordinated by its local AHSN.
Our Collaborative is made up of all the NHS providers and commissioners across the region, including hospitals, mental health and community organisations, the ambulance service, primary care and clinical commissioning groups.
We bring together local patients and healthcare staff, all driven by a shared vision to bring about system-wide improvements to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people in the care of our health services.
Our work programme is informed by the NHS Patient Safety Strategy launched in July 2019. Find out more about the initiation of the Patient Safety Collaborative programme in the 2017 report: A Commitment to Act.
By supporting colleagues to collectively pool and build their knowledge and skills and work together to improve clinical care, the Collaborative delivers an ambitious programme of change, including:
- adoption of the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) at all handovers of care
- the emergency department safety checklist
- maternal and neonatal health
- improving care for patients undergoing emergency laparotomy surgery
- supporting patients’ and families’ choice as they approach end of life
- improving quality and safety of services for people with mental health conditions
- support for primary care practices to develop a safety culture
- development of quality improvement skills to build capability to drive change.
Our impact
Our work is already having a tangible impact. To find out more, use the navigation menu on the right.
We were delighted that PReCePT won a Health Service Journal 2019 Patient Safety awards as Maternity and Midwifery Services Initiative of the Year.
We won the BMJ Patient Safety team of the Year in 2018 and Award for Deteriorating Patients and Rapid Response Systems for our work to improve the reliability of recognition and response to the deteriorating patient at the 2018 HSJ Patient Safety awards
We won the Best Patient Safety Initiative in A&E award at the 2017 Patient Safety awards held in Manchester.
