Last week I took the train down from Newcastle to London for my first day in the RCPCH office as the new Quality Improvement (QI) Fellow. I’m looking forward to what I’m sure will be a steep learning curve over the next two years, but hopefully contributing my experiences as both a Paediatric and Clinical Genetics trainee, alongside an ongoing role as Paediatric Sustainability Fellow at the Great North Children’s Hospital.
In our clinical work, safety should be first and foremost. It therefore seems fitting to share my first blog ahead of World Patient Safety Day, which falls on 17 September and coincides with my first attendance at the HSJ Patient Safety Congress. This annual WHO global public health day aims to increase understanding, promotion and practice of patient safety, with .
In the context of World Patient Safety Day, and being mindful of ongoing high profile patient safety cases throughout all of our careers, I wanted to highlight the . This is an excellent expert-collated resource hub, covering the fundamentals of paediatric patient safety, including a released earlier this year.
Sharing learning...will always be key to improvement
I will never forget, over 10 years ago as an undergraduate, hearing and the human factors lessons learnt from the aviation industry. Sharing learning with service users and colleagues will always be key to improvement. We are keen to connect and work with any colleagues with an interest in child health improvement and safety through our QI Community which will be launched later this autumn. If you are interested in being involved or hearing more, no matter your QI expertise (or lack of!), then please email us at qips@rcpch.ac.uk.
I will end by saying that safety needs to be more than a passive or reactive consideration in our bread-and-butter work with children and young people: we need to be employing conscious and proactive measures to ensure safety for all. Can we reframe our day-to-day perceptions of good clinical care and outcomes to explicitly include anticipation and avoidance of harm?