World Patient Safety Day: 17 September

September 15, 2022

Saturday 17 September is World Patient Safety Day. The day aims to raise awareness of patient safety and urge people to show their commitment to making healthcare safer. This would include speaking up about anything you believe could cause potential or real harm to our patients.

As a Trust we will be engaging in this year’s World Health Organisations (WHO) Safety Day – medication without harm. We recognise that there are improvements to be made across the domains of medicine management for safer care. Therefore this is an opportune time to focus where we need to make changes, to do better and reduce medication related incidents. The responsibility for this lies with us all.

This week and next week we are focussing on medicine safety. This includes:

• Understanding the issues and as part of weLearn – we will provide the data and insights to measure for improvement with new Medication Incident Dashboards
• Carry out audits
• Do a deep dive into issues caused by system factors such as Unity impacting on work arounds
• Additional education and training.

We will have information stands around the Trust from Tuesday 20 September across City (entrance to main hospital) Sandwell (Hallam restaurant and wards) Rowley and community hubs.

We will also be encouraging clinical areas to create displays of light up orange harm free care: medication management, outlining their mission statements and aims to improve. We have had our first information session with representation from 42 clinical areas: having committed to making improvements.

In addition, there will be competitions and prizes where the team will be looking for the most informative displays.

To get involved and find out more, please email marsha.jones3@nhs.net,