Winning the Patient Safety Learning 'Shared learning' award (2 October 2019)

Summary

Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Patient Safety Team won the Patient Safety Learning Award 2019 for Shared learning. In this blog, Cindy Storer describes her experience of the Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference and winning the award.

Content

We attended that Patient Safety Learning conference as this is something I am very interested in. I see my role as (acting) deputy director of nursing, midwifery and AHPs as one who should lead by example and champion high quality care for patients. For the last year, I have been developing a maturing patient safety team who are enthusiastic and willing to make changes for the benefits of our patients. We were looking for ways to innovate our shared learning, learn from others and make contacts with other innovators in this field.

Our initiative is using our Trust values ‘We care’ and weaving these into a golden thread for a monthly patient safety newsletter and annual conference for all Trust staff. We are now on edition 16 of our newsletter and our third annual conference is in the planning stage for April 2020.

This Christmas we worked with a local school on an alternative 12 days of Christmas. Our hospital singers came from the senor nursing team, midwives, consultants, junior doctors and patient safety team. This video is a good example of how we are slowly engaging staff with the patient safety messages

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We were thrilled to win the Patient Safety Learning award. We shared this on the train home on our staff social media page and referenced how proud we are of our colleagues who strive for patient safety every day. It's extremely motivating to have a little recognition for the continued hard work in keeping patient safety at the top of the Trust agenda.

With our prize money we are intending to visiting Homerton, another Patient Safety Learning award winner, to look at how they are implementing their App for policies. The approach and end result was really impressive and I am keen to explore how we could do this in our Trust.