Corporate Issue

North East Ambulance Service pledges to improve patient safety

North East Ambulance Service has pledged to improve patient safety as part of the national campaign, Sign up to Safety.

A patient safety campaign, Sign up to Safety is one of a set of national initiatives in England to help the NHS improve the safety of patient care. Collectively and cumulatively these initiatives aim to reduce avoidable harm by 50% and support the ambition to save 6,000 lives.

North East Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (NEAS) covers 3,200 square miles across the North East region.  It employs more than 2,500 staff and serves a population of 2.7 million people by handling all NHS 111 and 999 calls for the region, operating patient transport and ambulance response services, delivering training for communities and commercial audiences and providing medical support cover at events.

Director of Clinical Care and Patient Safety at NEAS, Joanne Baxter, said: “By joining Sign up to Safety, we are promising all our patients and staff that we are placing the safety of patient care above all else.

“We will achieve this by focusing on the areas we know can be improved to make care safer. We are committed to supporting our staff to be open with patients about the potential for things to go wrong and, most importantly, to continually learn from incidents in order to improve.”

In 2014/15 the service answered 1.107 million emergency 999 and NHS 111 calls, responded to 302,687 incidents that resulted in a patient being taken to hospital, treated and discharged 18,144 patients with telephone advice and treated and discharged 81,990 patients at home.  In the same year, emergency care crews reached 134,745 incidents within the national target of 8 minutes.

NEAS is one of more than 300 NHS organisations to have pledged support to this growing movement and are committed to improve the safety of healthcare through locally-owned and self-directed Safety Improvement Plans. These outline the actions that will be taken in response to five Sign up to Safety pledges.

Suzette Woodward, Sign up to Safety Campaign Director, said: “Our ambition is for the whole NHS in England to become the safest healthcare system in the world and NEAS is playing a critical part in helping to achieve this.

“We all recognise that healthcare carries some risk and while everyone working in the NHS works hard every day to reduce this risk, harm still happens. Whenever possible, we must do all we can to deliver harm-free care for each and every patient. We are helping each NHS organisation involved in Sign up to Safety to work on the things that matter to them and keep local solutions localised, but help to share learning nationally for others to adapt.”

“The five Sign up to Safety pledges represent the shared values and beliefs of those committed to creating a movement for patient safety that spans the whole system. We are united by our common goal; to continually strive to make the care we give our patients as safe as possible. Together we are helping the NHS to make improvements and creating a supportive, open and transparent environment for all patients and staff.”

The five Sign up to Safety pledges are:

  • Put safety first. Commit to reducing avoidable harm in the NHS by half and make public the goals and plans developed locally.
  • Continually learn. Be more resilient to risks as an organisation, by acting on the feedback from patients and by constantly measuring and monitoring how safe services are.
  • Be Honest. Be transparent with people about progress to tackle patient safety issues and support staff to be candid with patients and their families if something goes wrong.
  • Collaborate. Take a leading role in supporting local collaborative learning, so that improvements are made across all of the local services that patients use.
  • Be Supportive. Help people understand why things go wrong and how to put them right. Give staff the time and support to improve and celebrate progress.

The pledges for NEAS will be made available for patients, staff and carers at www.neas.nhs.uk and on the organisation’s Twitter and Facebook pages.  

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Notes to editors

Notes to Editors:

  • Organisations from across the NHS have shown their commitment to patient safety by signing up to Sign up to Safety. Across the total NHS in England, as at 21st September 2015:
    • Acute trusts: 92%
    • Ambulance trusts: 80%
    • Clinical Commissioning Groups: 24%
    • Community provider: 94%
    • Mental health trusts: 73%
    • Academic Health Science Networks: 53%

About Sign up to Safety

The vast majority of the care people receive from the NHS is safe, but sometimes things do go wrong and harm happens. As with any high risk industry, a focus on continuous learning about what it takes for a system to be safe is essential.

Across England, people are taking proactive steps to observe and improve how they deliver care so that they can learn how to make it safer. Sign up to Safety is a NHS-wide campaign to unite this work under a shared aim – to reduce avoidable harm by half and save 6,000 lives – helping to improve systems and empower each person to play their part in improving care.

Sign up to Safety is for everybody, in every part of the NHS whether they work in primary, secondary or tertiary care; acute, mental health, learning disabilities, ambulance or community care settings; in a national body or a general practice. We are united by our common goal; to continually strive to make the care we give our patients as safe as possible.

For more information visit www.signuptosafety.nhs.uk

About patient safety in England

Sign up to Safety is one of a series of safety initiatives launched by the Department of Health, borne out of recent reviews into safety in the NHS including The Francis Review and Professor Don Berwick’s report A Promise to Learn a Commitment to Act which highlighted the need for the NHS ‘to become, more than ever before, a system devoted to continual learning and improvement of patient care, top to bottom and end to end’.

Several initiatives are working in partnership to establish and deliver a single vision for the whole NHS to become the safest healthcare system in the world. For a summary visit www.signuptosafety.nhs.uk.