As part of the Trust’s zero harm strategy, the Executive Patient Safety Walkround programme has made almost 150 visits to wards and other clinical areas of the hospital over the past three years.
The Executive Patient Safety Walkround is solely about giving staff, patients and families the opportunity to identify safety issues with the aim to improve them.
The Executive Patient Safety Walkround has some key goals:
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To help staff become more confident and willing to engage with the safety agenda
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To make senior management more aware of patient and staff safety issues
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To follow up on safety issues quickly and effectively
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To make staff more aware of safety issues
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To improve relationships with frontline staff.
The process
Each Tuesday morning, the Executive Patient Safety Walkround team visits a clinical area and meets staff to explore how safety can be improved. The team is made up of an Executive Director, a member of the Clinical Governance and Safety team, a representative from Corporate Facilities and an Improvement Co-ordinator from Transformation for that clinical unit.
Issues are categorised as low, medium and high, with low and medium issues handled at unit level. Three high priority actions are allocated to a named Executive Patient Safety Walkround team member to follow up and resolve within one month.
All the issues are entered into a database that is updated weekly. The database enables detailed searches to be made, by issue, ward, unit, priority etc and generates an action report that is sent to the ward, Executive Patient Safety Walkround team, general manager and unit chair.
Resolving issues
The clear-up rate of high priority issues is improving: last year 50 per cent were resolved and 26 per cent were partly resolved. Those that remained unresolved were generally about physical space and long-term issues like staffing levels that simply cannot be dealt with within the desired timeframe.
However, these issues remain noted and are regularly checked for updates. Looking forward, efforts are being made to address these ongoing concerns through the redevelopment programme and other service improvement work.
The most popular issues of last year are, unsurprisingly, environmental – the physical space and fabric of the building, accounting for just over 25 per cent of all issues. Second was equipment at 23 per cent and then processes at almost 20 per cent.
