Patient transport and safety
What is Patient Safety?
Patient safety is an essential part of healthcare, including patient transport, and has become more important than ever. It aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors, and harm which occur to patients in any healthcare setting. Therefore, one of the foundations of patient safety is continuous improvement, based on learning from errors and serious incidents.
Patient safety is fundamental to delivering quality health services. It is widely agreed that quality health services should always be effective, safe and person-centred. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) demonstrate this through the measurements they apply when they inspect services. For example, they ask the same five questions of every service:
- Are they safe?
- Are they effective?
- Are they caring?
- Are they responsive to people’s need;
- Are they well-led
As you can see ‘Safe’ is at the top of the list, therefore this question is always the focus at any CQC inspection.
Patient Transport and Patient Safety
We aim to provide a patient-focused, safe and therapeutic journey at all times. However, how can we be sure that we do everything in our power to make it safe?
By;
- the implementation of patient safety strategies.
- our clear policies.
- having a strong leadership team in place.
- employing a skilled team of professional staff.
- the effective involvement of patients in their care.
Learning is key
The only way to make sure we don’t repeat mistakes and errors is to learn from them. Therefore when things go wrong in care, it is essential that we record all incidents. This means that learning can take place, so we can then work out what went wrong and why. Through learning, we will ensure that effective, sustainable and measurable actions are taken. As a result, taking action greatly reduces the risk of similar incidents happening again.
Very simply, patient safety is about maximising the things that go right and minimising the things that go wrong.