Implementing Patient Safety : Addressing Culture, Conditions, and Values to Help People Work Safely

Over the last fifteen years across the globe we have seen a multitude of improvement programs and projects to improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However the full potential of these efforts and especially those that seek to address an entire system has not yet been reached. Most of the current approaches are top down, programmatic and target driven. In terms of changing behavior and practice as well as processes and systems, different thinking is needed. We have tended to focus on problems in isolation, one harm at a time and our efforts have been simplistic and myopic. If we are to save more lives and significantly reduce patient harm, we need to adopt a holistic, systematic approach that extends across cultural, technological and procedural boundaries. Those who work in patient safety are struggling and to date books on patient safety instruct the reader to continue doing the same things we have been doing for the last fifteen years. Their ability to improve the safety of patient care has been eroded by the complexity of the way in which we work and their own exhaustion. People have become polarized, overwhelmed, isolated and withdrawn and frustrated at the increasing number of problems that confront them and the impotence to resolve even the simplest ones. This book builds on the book, Rethinking Patient Safety. The first book talked about the ways in which we need to rethink patient safety in healthcare and what we've learned over the last two decades. This book talks about what we can do differently. How we can use these lessons to improve the way in which we implement patient safety initiatives and how we can implement a safety culture across a healthcare system. This is the 'how-to' book to implementing patient safety. This book updates readers on the unique knowledge and experience gained over the last three years of the Sign Up to Safety campaign which brings together the science of implementation, social movement thinking and campaigning and how these are all being used to make a real difference to the safety of patient care.