Patient Safety First and the Clinical Board for Surgical Safety host Safer Surgery Week
Published: 14 November 2012
The Clinical Board for Surgical Safety was created to provide a formal structure for advice and oversight of the work programmes of the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA).
While the NPSA has since been abolished, the board still functions in a shadow form while awaiting future direction from the NHS Commissioning Board.
The Clinical Board for Surgical Safety works in collaboration with the following professional organisations:
- Royal College of Surgeons (chair)
- Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland
- Association for Perioperative Practitioners
- Confidential Reporting System in Surgery
- College of Operating Department Practitioners
- National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death
- Royal College of Anaesthetists
- Royal College of Nursing (Perioperative Forum committee)
- Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists
- Royal College of Ophthalmologists.
Recent collaboration saw Patient Safety First, a campaign for England, and the Clinical Board for Surgical Safety host Safer Surgery Week in September.
In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the Surgical Safety Checklist as part of the Safe Surgery Saves Lives initiative. This included improving anaesthetic safety practices, ensuring correct site surgery, avoiding surgical site infections and improving communication and teamwork within the team.
Early learning identified that the safety checks could be more reliably undertaken when they were delivered through a Five Steps to Safer Surgery process, adding in briefings and debriefings to the existing sign in, time out and sign out steps of the checklist.
During Safer Surgery Week a number of simple local activities designed to help improve the quality and reliability of local implementation of the NSA’s Five Steps to Safer Surgery were suggested. These were:
- undertake a brief or debrief
- invite a neighbouring theatre to your brief or debrief
- introduce “stop the line” for one list
- invite a board member to observe one list
- hold a morbidity and mortality meeting.
A series of online webinars, covering a range of topics were also held:
- Safer surgery - the continuing challenge
- Developing a vision and strategy for nursing and midwifery
- A national evaluation of the implementation of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist: triumphs and challenges
- Human Factors- safely managing the unplanned
- Safer surgery - learning from service reviews
- Safer practice in surgery – a professional responsibility
- 'Stop the line' at Virginia Mason Medical Centre and Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust
- The five steps implementation story – University College Hospital London Trust
- Never events - the CQC's role and a trust's story
For more information from the week and to access the recorded webinars visit the Patient Safety First website.