Patient Safety

The Trust is committed to listening to our patients and staff about how we can improve our care and treatment to ensure that we make our Trust a safer place for its patients and the staff who work here.

As a large healthcare organisation, which provides both acute and community care, Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust demonstrates a very positive and proactive culture of patient safety incident reporting and being open with patients, visitors and staff when things go wrong.

In the past year around 21,000 patient safety incidents were reported by staff. Incidents are also reported and managed which involve staff, visitors, contractors and other partnership organisations.

All incidents are investigated proportionately, with moderate, severe harm and death incidents requiring a higher level of investigation using recognised investigation tools.  These investigation tools help to establish and identify whether there have been gaps or omissions in care or treatment, or process errors, whilst also identifying best practice and shared learning.  Action plans, with definitive timeframes and identified responsible leads are produced for each of these incidents, which are monitored for compliance and effectiveness in reducing harms.  However, it is also recognised by the Trust the importance of investigating low harm and near miss incidents, to prevent future more serious harm occurring.

Serious incidents in healthcare are relatively uncommon, but when they do occur we have a responsibility to ensure that there are systemic measures in place for safeguarding people, property, NHS resources and reputation. We strongly support an open and transparent incident reporting culture and supporting processes to ensure patient and staff safety, and actively promote the importance of learning to prevent re-occurrence.

The Trust ensures that its investigation processes, findings, conclusions and learning are shared widely across the organisation and with our stakeholders.  The Trust also triangulates learning from formal complaints, informal patient concerns, claims, litigation, inquests, as well as from incidents, in order to capture where improvements and innovative change needs to happen.