SW AHSN’s Sign Up to Safety Pledge

Sign up to Safety – Harnessing the commitment of staff across the NHS in England to make care safer.

The vision is for the whole NHS to become the safest healthcare system in the world, aiming to deliver harm free care for every patient every time. This means taking all the activities and programmes that each of our organisations undertake and aligning them with this single common purpose.

Sign up to Safety has an ambition of halving avoidable harm in the NHS over the next three years and saving 6,000 lives as a result.

Through the Patient Safety Collaborative, the SW AHSN commits to encouraging and supporting organisations to:

1. Putting safety first. Commit to reduce avoidable harm in the NHS by half and make public our locally developed goals and plans.
We will support local teams and organisations with their plans to reduce avoidable harm across the South West through the Patient Safety Collaborative.

2. Continually learning. Make our organisation more resilient to risks, by acting on the feedback from patients and staff and by constantly measuring and monitoring how safe our services are.
We will support local teams and organisations create effective learning environments and ensure that patients and the public are involved in our work.

3. Being honest. Be transparent with people about our progress to tackle patient safety issues and support staff to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong.
We will support local teams and organisations to understand, measure and monitor patient safety culture in organisations to allow individuals and teams to create a culture of openness and transparency.

4. Collaborating. Take a lead role in supporting local collaborative learning, so that improvements are made across all of the local services that patients use.
We will connect individuals and organisations together through events, workshops and training across the South West. We will also connect individuals and organisations together through a software system that enables people to communicate their quality improvement projects with each other.

5. Being supportive. Help our people understand why things go wrong and how to put them right. Give them the time and support to improve and celebrate progress.
We will approach patient safety from a positive position focusing on reliability rather than avoidable harm.

To find out more information or to sign yourself or your organisation up go to www.signuptosafety.nhs.uk