New Team, New Commission, New Opportunities await for the Wessex Patient Safety Collaborative

Firstly let me introduce the fabulous Wessex Patient Safety Collaborative Team that has grown over the last 18 months to support a widening portfolio of safety improvement programmes informed by the Patient Safety Strategy, and the National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes (known as NatPatSIP) which are led by NHS England and NHS Improvement. Read more about the NatPatSIP.

I myself am new to Wessex AHSN but have lived in Hampshire for 17 years and worked at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust as their Patient Safety and Quality Manager, and then at Oxford AHSN as a Patient Safety Programme Manager in the Managing Deterioration Programme. 

All of our programme managers have a clinical background, including midwives; nurses with experience in ICU and mental health; and I am a respiratory physiotherapist by background. We work across service user pathways adding value to our system partners by using quality improvement methodology to support developments in health and social care. 

We are extremely fortunate to have James as our “lynch pin” (groan!) whose strong administrative skills help with the organisation and coordination of our various patient safety networks, communications, and meetings, as well as our management and reporting requirements.

We are continuing to build on the excellent work summarised in our annual review.

Our new commission for 2022/23 is outlined in the diagram below

As ICSs mature we are aligning our strategies to focus on local priorities in terms of patient safety and quality, whilst continuing to work at regional and national level to identify innovations and models of care that we can adapt and learn from.

We have some exciting projects coming up in 2022/23 such as piloting the use of team coaching in our Maternity and Neonatal Service Improvement Programme, a partnership with the South East Leadership Academy and evaluation supported by Bournemouth University. Our aim is to create a package that can be adopted by all seven of our maternity and neonatal services and potentially spread nationally.

We are also supporting a bid with University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton to form an NIHR Patient Safety Research Collaboration, to improve patient safety by reducing pressure ulcers, infections and other harms. We will do this by developing and implementing safer and more effective devices, technologies and approaches for fundamental care in nutrition, skin and catheter management.

I look forward to sharing more with you as these projects progress, but for now please take a look at our web pages for more information.