World Patient Safety Day 2021: How can Aqua support you?

World Patient Safety Day works to ‘‘enhance global understanding of patient safety, increase public engagement in health care safety, and promote global action to prevent and reduce avoidable harm in health care.”

Each year there is a different theme set for the day, this year’s theme sets out to prioritize and address safety in maternal and newborn care, with particular focus on time of childbirth and the disruption of services due the COVID-19 pandemic.

Aqua has been working with Maternity teams for many years and has a proven track record in helping support and improve services in the area, currently, whist we maintain our work at local level we are also supporting the delivery of the national maternity safety programme.

We have been working alongside The NHS England and NHS Improvement Women’s Health Policy Team to scope, co-design and deliver a bespoke Safety Culture Programme for Maternity and Neonatal Leaders involving all maternity providers across England.

Aqua have extensive experience in delivering training programmes within the NHS to understand and improve the safety culture of organisations and we are helping leaders to understand the relationship between safety improvement and safety culture in order to improve the safety and quality of care delivered to mothers and babies. Read more about our maternity work here.

Alongside this work within Maternity, there is of course the ongoing need to deliver the requirements of the national safety drivers set out by NHSE/I. The National Patient Safety Strategy (NPSS) was released in 2019 and although the pandemic interrupted its operational delivery the time is now right to consider how organisations will be able to deliver against its requirements.

Many organisations are now looking to utilise the learning from the pandemic and hold onto any gains that were created during this difficult time. Clearly the challenge is to recover safety, implement any new systems of work uncovered during the pandemic and deliver the requirements of the strategy.

The latest version of the Safety Syllabus was also released this year to support the delivery of the NPSS work, the operational curriculum is currently being worked on and its release is eagerly anticipated.

However, Aqua have considered the challenges being faced by organisations and have created a series of driver diagrams and frameworks to help our members and customers understand the incredibly wide and diverse range of safety improvement programmes that we currently have on offer. These frameworks are intended to provide visibility of how our programmes align to the Safety Syllabus and how participation will support organisational delivery of the NPSS.

We have recently published an overview of how we can support the safety work in your organisation, download this here.