NHS building

When Will the NHS Get Its Complaints System Right?

By John Tingle

The National Health Service (NHS) in England has been trying to get an effective, fit-for-purpose complaints system for at least 28 years, and it has still not succeeded.

This has been one of the NHS’s perpetual and intractable problems. History has not served the NHS well here, despite the publication of countless reports on patient safety and NHS complaint handling, and several major crises happening, such as Mid Staffordshire.

More often than not, the reports into patient safety crises and NHS complaints system reform all say the same (or similar) thing, and point to the same issues.

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‘Safe spaces’ in adverse health incident investigation and patient complaints

By John Tingle

Two new reports, one by Action against Medical Accidents,(AvMA),the charity for patient safety and justice and the other by the Patient’s Association charity, (PA), highlight once again significant  problems with NHS (National Health Service) patient safety investigative and complaints structures and procedures.

The Department of Health, (DH) in 2016 produced a consultation paper which closed on 16th December 2016 on providing a ‘safe space’ in healthcare safety investigations.

This is linked to the new NHS, Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB),operational from April 2016, and when fully functional will  offer support and guidance to NHS organizations on investigations, and carry out certain investigations itself.Current Government policy is to consider the development of a ‘safe space’ in serious adverse health incident investigations. The Consultation paper stated:

“…many believe that the creation of a type of ‘strong wall’ around certain health service investigations, so that information given as part of an investigation would only rarely be passed on, would provide a measure of ‘psychological safety’ to those involved in investigation, allowing them to speak freely. This will enable lessons to be learned, driving improvement and ultimately saving lives.” (p.8). Read More

Missed opportunities to learn from patient deaths in the NHS

By John Tingle

The National Health Service (NHS) in England’s quality regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has recently published a highly critical report on the way patient deaths are investigated in the NHS. The investigation follows events at the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust where a number of failings were identified in the way patient deaths were identified and investigated. Certain groups of patients including people with a learning disability and older people receiving mental health care were far less likely to have their deaths investigated by this Trust. The Secretary of State for Health called for a CQC investigation into how acute, community and mental health NHS facilities across the country investigate and learn from deaths. The findings of the report are not good and major improvements in this area are needed across the NHS.

There are failings in openness, transparency and missed opportunities to learn important patient safety lessons. Families of patients and carers told the CQC reviewers that they often have a poor experience of investigations and are not always treated with kindness, respect, honesty and sensitivity. The CQC states that across their review they were unable to identify any NHS healthcare facility that could demonstrate good practice across all aspects of identifying, reviewing and investigating deaths and ensuring that learning from the events is implemented. Read More

Scottish clinical guidelines on patients’ pressure ulcer care published

By John Tingle

Failures in assessing the patient properly for pressure ulcers can result in adverse incident reports, complaints and even litigation. A look at medical malpractice lawyer web sites in both the UK and USA will reveal a number of attorneys offering specialism in pressure sore litigation and publishing compensation awards. In the NHS poor pressure area care is a key patient safety issue and positive steps have been taken to reduce the occurrence of these incidents which can cause result in severe harm and even death to patients. The incidents also cost healthcare services a lot of money in remedying the problems of neglect.

The problem of poor pressure area care can also be seen in other countries. Health is a fairly generic concept, whilst the context of health care may well be different, valuable patient safety lessons can be learned from looking at the health quality reports of other countries. Developing an informed comparative patient safety perspective to issues can save both time and money by not reinventing the wheel.

There is new guidance from Scotland, Healthcare improvement Scotland (HIS) on the prevention and management of pressures ulcers which will be of interest to nurses and all those concerned with health quality and governance. Read More

Learning from adverse health care events in Scotland

By John Tingle

We can learn a lot from how other countries deal with patient safety issues and it can save us from reinventing the wheel at some financial cost.Healthcare improvement Scotland  (HIS) is the national healthcare improvement organization for Scotland and is part of NHS Scotland. The organization provides some excellent patient safety resources. The work of HIS involves supporting and empowering people to have an informed voice in managing their own care and shaping how services are designed and delivered. Delivering scrutiny activity, providing quality improvement support and providing clinical standards, guidelines and advice. HIS produce a rich range of programmes and publications that are relevant to all those concerned with patient safety and health quality in England, USA and elsewhere.

A recent report from HIS focuses on the adverse event lessons learned by health boards and the improvements they subsequently put into place after the events,Learning from adverse events – Learning and improvement summary: May 2016 There is some very good thinking in the report which should be essential reading for all staff involved in patient safety policy development.

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Child safeguarding: the National Health Service (NHS) can do much better

By John Tingle

Our children are our future and we need to look after them well. There is however a lot of evidence to suggest that we are failing our children in a number of key health areas. UNICEF in a report put the UK in 16th position – below Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal – in a league table of child well-being in the world’s richest countries. The report considers five dimensions of children’s lives – material well-being, health and safety, education, behaviours and risks, and housing and environment – as well as children’s subjective well-being.

There are a number of health and other child well-being challenges for the UK to meet. The UNICEF report provides some useful context from which to view the recently published Care Quality Commission (CQC) report on the arrangements for child safeguarding and healthcare for looked after children in England.The CQC is the independent regulator of health and social care in England.Whilst the report does contain some positive findings, when read as a whole, these seem subsumed by the large number of negative findings, some of which are very worrying. Read More

Learning from mistakes in the NHS: a special report by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) into how the NHS failed to investigate properly the death of a three-year-old child.

By John Tingle

In the UK where health is concerned money is a particularly poor compensator for the loss of a limb, faculty or even a family member. In my experience patients who have suffered adverse health incidents, negligence, more often than not, are not primarily motivated by obtaining monetary compensation. They seek in the main an explanation of what occurred and why, an apology and an assurance that what happened will not happen to anybody else; that lessons have been learned.

The NHS (National Health Service) for decades has been unable to provide a satisfactory complaints and patient adverse incident investigation service which provides these outcomes generally. More often than not patients have to resort to complaining or beginning litigation in order to find out what happened and why and the process that they have to embark on can alienate them even more as they soon hit major and seemingly unsurmountable obstacles. The NHS maintains a defensive and blame ridden culture when errors happen as the terrible events of Mid Staffordshire revealed.

The report Read More