Patient Safety Improvement

High-profile care failings such as those at the former Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, and more recently at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust illustrated what happens when patient safety is not seen as a key priority, while winter pressures combined with severe nursing shortages often lead to concerns that safety is being compromised. As the professionals with the greatest amount of patient contact, nurses play a vital role in ensuring patients’ safety at every stage in their care.

This category is open to individuals or teams from the NHS or independent sector who have undertaken an initiative to address factors that place patients at risk and promote safety as an essential part of healthcare. Entrants should have clear outcomes demonstrating improvements in patient safety.

Examples may include:

• Reducing the incidence of falls
• Improving safety in the prescription and administration of medicines
• Reducing delays to treatment or minimising the risks associated with delays

Each entry will be judged against the following criteria:

• Innovation: originality of the idea
• Value: impact of the initiative on patient care and/or service effectiveness
• Patient focus: evidence that patient/service user need was central to the work
• Collaboration: evidence of the involvement of other professionals, services and/or patients in the project
• Clinical effectiveness: data demonstrating how this initiative drives clinical enhancements
• Leadership: evidence of entrants championing their innovation in their organisation or more widely
• Adaptability: ideas that could be adapted for use elsewhere in entrants’ organisations or other organisations
• Sustainability: initiatives that can be embedded within organisations to operate without the input of the people who developed them 

Take a look at what our 2019 winner had to say about winning this award: