Patient safety and human factors: Wales

In Wales 1000 Lives Plus is the national improvement programme which seeks to improve patient safety and reduce avoidable harm across NHS Wales, building on the work of the two-year 1000 Lives Campaign which ended in April 2010. See: 1000 Lives Plus. The programme is "focussed on building capacity and spreading improvements" using a specific improvement methodology and aims to establish a common and consistent approach to improvement across all NHS organisations in Wales.  

In November 2012 1000 Plus Lives published a ‘white paper’ on Achieving high reliability in NHS Wales which discusses reduction of error and harm in NHS Wales, and explores how high reliability could make NHS Wales a better and safer place to both work and be a patient in. It sets out the principles and practices that need to be adopted by identifying the five key drivers that will help NHS Wales achieve high reliability in all its services.

The 1000 Lives Plus programme areas also address a number of specific patient safety issues such as: leadership; reducing healthcare associated infections; improving medicines management; and preventing hospital acquired thrombosis. Details of current and past programmes can be found in the section of the website on areas of work. 

The NHS Wales e-governance manual sets the context of patient safety and Wales (NHS Wales 2012). It highlights the resources provided by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA). Although the key function and expertise in England for patient safety developed by the NPSA have been transferred to a new body, the NHS Commissioning Board Special Health Authority (NHS CBA) (NPSA 2012), the resources developed by the NPSA continue to be made available at: Patient Safety resources.

These resources include alerts, guidance and learning tools, which have drawn on the learning gained from analysis of patient safety incident reports made possible through the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS). The operational delivery of the NRLS has been transferred from the NPSA to Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (ICHT). Health care organisations are asked to continue to report patient safety incidents to the NRL at: Report a patient safety incident.  

More information about policy, programmes and guidance is available at UK resources. You can find out about:

For further information relating to quality improvement and other clinical governance issues in Wales visit the Clinical Governance resource.

For fortnightly updates on patient safety and other themes you can register for the Quality and safety e-Bulletin.

References

These resources were last accessed on 3 December 2012.
  
NHS Wales (2012) Patient safety. NHS Governance e-Manual website. (Select the 'Putting the citizen first' tab).

NPSA (2012) Transfer of patient safety function to the NHS Commissioning Board Special Health Authority. NPSA website.