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Content ArticleAntibiotic resistance is a growing issue for medicine globally, so finding alternative medications is a priority for medical research. This study in The BMJ aimed to test and compare the efficacy of methenamine hippurate with the current standard use of daily low dose antibiotics to prevent recurrent urinary tract infections in women. The authors of the study concluded that non-antibiotic prophylactic treatment with methenamine hippurate might be appropriate for women with a history of recurrent episodes of urinary tract infections. The study demonstrated that the treatment had a similar success rate as daily antibiotic prophylaxis.
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Content ArticleThe gender health gap is a long-standing, deeply entrenched problem that stretches back centuries - yet it is only finally starting to get the attention it deserves. In this discussion hosted by The Independent's Women's Correspondent Maya Oppenheim, Dr Jess Taylor, Le’Nise Brothers, Sandra Igwe and Dr Geeta Nargund explore the steps that must be taken to solve the gender health gap, including proper education of health professionals and engaging in open honest conversations.
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Content ArticleThe Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) was introduced in England in 2019 as a key part of the government’s manifesto commitment to improve access to general practice. The aim of the scheme is to support the recruitment of 26,000 additional staff into general practice. This is a huge ambition and requires significant and complex change across general practice. While primary care networks (PCNs) have swiftly recruited to these roles, they are not being implemented and integrated into primary care teams in an effective way. This research by The King's Fund focused on four roles to examine the issues related to their implementation: social prescribing link workers first contact physiotherapists paramedics pharmacists. The research examined the experiences of people working in these roles, and of the people managing them. It found a lack of shared understanding about the purpose or potential contribution of the roles, combined with ambiguity about what multidisciplinary working would mean for GPs. If the scheme is to be successfully implemented, it will require extensive cultural, organisational and leadership development skills that are not easily accessible to PCNs.
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Content ArticleAs well as having a significant negative impact on the health and wellbeing of people with dementia, falls increase service costs related to staff time, paramedic visits, and A&E admissions. This study in the Journal of Patient Safety examined whether a remote digital vision-based monitoring and management system had an impact on the prevention of falls. The authors concluded that a contact-free, remote digital vision-based monitoring and management system reduced falls, fall-related injuries, emergency services time, clinician time, and disruptive night time observations. This benefits clinicians by allowing them to undertake other clinical duties and promotes the health and safety of patients who might normally experience injury-related stress and disruption to sleep.
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Content ArticleThis guide by the non-profit organisation US Pharmacopeia highlights the global challenge of substandard and falsified Covid-19 vaccines and the impact this has on individuals, the ability to control the pandemic, larger societal health, public trust and social justice. It outlines strategies to help prevent, detect and respond to substandard and falsified vaccines, in line with existing World Health Organization processes.
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EventuntilThis seminar is hosted by the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group and hosted by Professor Jane O'Hara from the University of Leeds. Understanding what happens when things go wrong in healthcare remains the cornerstone of patient safety policy globally. Organisations want, and need, to learn about safety failures in order to try and reduce the likelihood of similar events happening in the future. Patients and families also want to prevent future recurrence of safety failures. On the face of it, engaging with patients and families in serious incident investigations seems like an obviously important aim, and perhaps one that should be relatively straightforward to achieve. However, despite a range of policy directives for involving patients and families in the process of investigating serious safety failures, the practice of involvement remains variable. This webinar will present findings from a programme of work funded by the National Institute for Health Research, which has developed, and is now testing, new guidance for engaging patients and families in serious incident investigations. I will discuss what patients and families want from incident investigations, and how this has shaped our co-design of the new guidance. I will also consider how sometimes, different understandings of what justice might mean for responses to safety failures, can lead to problems for organisations, staff and patients and families. I will propose that involvement of patients and families is a deceptively simple endeavour, and that without careful articulation of what different stakeholders want and need following safety failures, we can compromise organisational learning, and most importantly, risk compounding the harm for those affected. Biography Jane O’Hara is Professor of Healthcare Quality and Safety, based within the School of Healthcare, University of Leeds, UK. She is Deputy Director of the Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group, and theme lead for the Patient Involvement in Patient Safety theme within the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Translational Research Centre. Jane also holds a Visiting Professor position at the SHARE Centre for Resilience in Healthcare at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Register for this event. If you have questions about this event, please contact the seminar organisers Siobhan McHugh or Helen Smith.
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Content Article
Belfast Healthy Cities: Pharmacy Schools Programme (2021)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Medication
The Pharmacy Schools Programme is an innovative teaching resource developed by Belfast Healthy Cities. Using a health literacy approach, it is designed to be used in primary schools in Northern Ireland to help educate children about self-care, medication safety and community pharmacy services. -
Content ArticleThe Covid-19 pandemic has stretched healthcare staff like never before. Tom Moberly reports on a roundtable discussion hosted by The BMJ as part of the 2022 Nuffield Trust summit, looking at why workers leave the NHS and how staff wellbeing and retention can be improved.
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Content ArticleIn this episode of The King's Fund podcast, host Helen McKenna speaks with Professor Dame Lesley Regan and Dr Janine Austin Clayton about women’s health journeys from start to finish. They explore why women can struggle to get medical professionals to listen to them and the impact this has on diagnosis and treatment, as well as the mental and physical effects on women themselves.
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Content ArticleAs the global population ages, more people are likely to suffer from multiple long term illnesses and therefore take multiple medications. This report by the World Health Organization highlights the importance of leadership in nurturing a culture that prioritises safe, high-quality prescribing, provides guidance on medication review, and emphasises the role of the patient in prescribing decisions. It also examines the role of multi-professional teams across the healthcare system, including amongst policy makers. The report includes tools and case studies which illustrate a systematic approach that can be followed across the health and care system to ensure that patients are integral to the decisions about their medications.
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Content Article
The third WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: Medication Without Harm proposes solutions to address obstacles to safe medication practices. WHO aims to achieve widespread engagement and commitment of WHO Member States and professional bodies around the world to reducing the harm associated with medication. This Strategic Framework of the Global Patient Safety Challenge depicts the four domains of the Challenge: patients and the public, health care professionals, medicines and systems and practices of medication. The framework describes each domain through four subdomains. The three key action areas – polypharmacy, high-risk situations and transitions of care – are relevant in each domain and therefore form an inner circle. -
EventuntilPatient Academy for Innovation and Research (PAIR Academy) and the International Alliance of Patients’ Organizations (IAPO) are launching a series of webinars to introduce the Strategic Framework of the Global Patient Safety Challenge - Medication Without Harm. This is the first webinar of the series and will take place at 17.00 IST (11.30 GMT). The theme is "An approach towards medication safety for patients and family." Register for the webinar
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Content Article
WHO - Announcing World Patient Safety Day 2022 (4 March 2022)
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in WHO
The theme for World Patient Safety Day 2022 is Medication Safety. It will take place on 17 September 2022. Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are a leading cause of avoidable harm in healthcare across the world. Medication errors occur when weak medication systems, and human factors such as fatigue, poor environmental conditions or staff shortages, affect prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, administration and monitoring practices. This can result in severe patient harm, disability and even death. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has significantly exacerbated the risk of medication errors and associated medication-related harm. The theme builds on the ongoing WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge: Medication Without Harm. It also provides much-needed impetus to take urgent action for reducing medication-related harm through strengthening systems and practices of medication use. -
Content Article
This is the third in our new series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to different people about their role and what motivates them to make health and social care safer. Deinniol tells us about how his role at the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) helps make healthcare services in the UK safer for both patients and staff. He explains the importance of understanding the complexity of healthcare systems and the pressures that staff within the NHS face. He highlights the need build trust with patients, staff and other stakeholders to find ways forward in improving patient safety. -
Content ArticleThis study in Nature Medicine aimed to characterise post-acute cardiovascular manifestations of Covid-19 that had not yet been comprehensively researched. The authors used national healthcare databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs to build a cohort of 153,760 individuals with Covid-19, as well as two sets of control cohorts with 5,637,647 (contemporary controls) and 5,859,411 (historical controls) individuals, to estimate risks and one-year burdens of a set of pre-specified cardiovascular outcomes. The study demonstrated that, following the initial 30 days after infection, individuals with Covid-19 are at increased risk of incident cardiovascular disease, including cerebrovascular disorders, dysrhythmias, ischemic and non-ischemic heart disease, pericarditis, myocarditis, heart failure and thromboembolic disease. These risks were evident even among individuals who were not hospitalised during the acute phase of the infection and increased in a graded fashion according to the care setting during the acute phase (non-hospitalised, hospitalised and admitted to intensive care). The authors conclude the risk and one-year burden of cardiovascular disease in survivors of acute Covid-19 are substantial, and that pathways should include attention to cardiovascular health and disease.
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Content Article
In this blog, we take a look at why women have been historically underrepresented in clinical trials and medical research, and the ongoing implications this has on medication safety for women. -
Content ArticleSpeaking to patients about what matters to them helps healthcare teams understand individuals' priorities, leading to better care partnerships and improved patient experience. This toolkit developed by the Montefiore Medical Center in New York provides an outline of how to implement "what matters to you?" (WMTY) conversations in healthcare settings.
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Content ArticleThis article in the journal IJQHC Communications examines how looking at the ‘Head’, ‘Heart’ and ‘Hands’ aspects of quality improvement can accelerate adoption of change, optimise the use of resources and maximise the impact and sustainability of interventions. It defines the different elements of Head, Heart and Hands approaches and looks at how these could be applied to rapidly changing environments such as healthcare systems during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Content ArticleSky Rollings had been diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD) and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. She was transferred from a Children and Adolescent Mental Health Hospital to the Acute Adult Unit at the Harplands Hospital on 4 November 2019. She died on 9 November at the Royal Stoke University Hospital.
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Content ArticleThis thesis explores different aspects of risk and safety in healthcare, adding to previous research by studying patient safety in first-contact care, primary care and the emergency department. The author investigated preventable harm and serious safety incidents in primary health care and emergency departments, and found that diagnostic error was the most common type or error. The thesis makes recommendations for safety improvements at all levels of a healthcare system.
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Content ArticleThis guidance from the British Medical Association (BMA) covers frequently asked questions around prescribing in primary care and informs GPs of the BMA general practice committee’s policies in prescribing.
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Content Article
WHO medsafe app
Patient-Safety-Learning posted an article in Medication
The World Health Organization has released a mobile application for patients and their families and caregivers as part of its Global Patient Safety Challenge: 'Medication Without Harm'. The app is designed to guide patients through the five key moments where action can reduce the risk of medication-related harm, and to facilitate patients to ask their healthcare professional important questions about their medications. The app is available from Google Play and the Apple App Store. -
Content ArticleThis literature review in the Journal of Patient Safety aimed to assess lessons learned on patient safety in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, and to assess whether they can be applied to humanitarian medicine. The authors concluded that safety culture and strategies will need to be adapted to address different intervention contexts and to respond to the concerns and expectations of humanitarian staff. As there is no overarching authority for the sector, medical humanitarian organisations, have a major responsibility in the development of a general patient safety policy in all their operations.
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Content ArticleThe Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated a trend of decline in access to and outcomes in healthcare. This situation means that people who have the means to do so are opting for faster, private care, creating a two-tier healthcare system. However, IPPR polling shows that near-universal public support remains for retaining a universal, free, comprehensive and tax-funded NHS. The public highly values the principles of the NHS as a system that universalises the benefits of the best healthcare and shares the cost across the population. This report by The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank proposes policies based on three aims: recovery, building back better and increased sustainability facing an uncertain future.
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Content ArticleThis study in PLOS Medicine looked at the uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine in different ethnic groups in Manchester between 1 December 2020 and 18 April 2021. Covid-19 vaccine uptake is lower amongst most minority ethnic groups compared to the White British group in England, despite higher Covid-19 mortality rates. This study adds to existing evidence by estimating inequalities for 16 minority ethnic groups, examining ethnic inequalities within population subgroups, and comparing the scale of ethnic inequalities in Covid-19 vaccine uptake to those for routine seasonal influenza vaccine uptake. The authors of the study found that ethnic inequalities in Covid-19 vaccine uptake exceeded those for influenza vaccine uptake. existed amongst those recently vaccinated against influenza. were widest amongst those with greatest Covid-19 risk. This suggests the Covid-19 vaccination programme has created additional, different health inequalities. They suggest that further research and policy action is needed to understand and remove barriers to vaccine uptake, and to build trust and confidence amongst minority ethnic communities.
