The NHS Confederation accords high priority to patient safety and is actively involved in a range of initiatives to promote improvements in patient safety across the NHS. The Confederation is a signatory to the Patient Safety Charter and participates in the National Patient Safety Forum and the Strategy Advisory Group for the National Patient Safety Campaign. We hold regular stakeholder meetings with key agencies, and have an ongoing work programme to support our members address safety issues.

For example, earlier this year the NHS Confederation ran a joint event and produced a briefing with the NPSA to promote learning from high reporting trusts and to support development of the national learning and reporting system. Quality and safety featured in our 2008 annual conference programme and will be in the NHS Employers conference in November this year. The Primary Care Network is also looking at the role of the commissioner in improving patient safety.

We welcome Lord Dazi's report High Quality Care for All (2008) which places safety at the heart of the quality agenda. We believe patient safety needs to link with the key drivers in the report including the CQUIN (Commissioning for quality, innovation and outcomes) initiative, the establishment of NHS Evidence, a single portal for clinical and non clinical evidence and best practice and be an ongoing agenda item for the National Quality Board.

Avoidable harm

High quality Care for All (2008) seeks to build on existing patient safety initiatives, many premised in Safety first (2006) and emphasises that the patient environment should be clean and safe and avoidable harm should be reduced (e.g. drug errors and HCAI).

Safety first (Department of Health, 2006) indicated that one in ten patients admitted to hospitals in developed countries will be unintentionally the victim of an error and that around half of these events could have been avoided if lessons from previous incidents had been learned. In essence the same errors and system failures are often repeated.

In our work with the NPSA this year, we advocate a systemic approach to preventing, analysing and learning from errors as essential to embed changes for patient safety.

We continue to work closely with the NPSA in particular as they develop a list of 'never events'. (e.g wrong site surgery). We also liaise with them as they consult on redefining serious untoward incidents and as they develop Patient Safety Direct, an incident reporting system (please see publications for further information of this work)

Regulatory reform

The current reform of professional and system regulation has the issue of patient safety at its core. We will continue to engage with the Department of Health and represent member views on the development of the new regulatory systems over the coming months. Further information cane be found on our regulation pages.

HCAI

Infection control is the top of the board agenda in the NHS. We have always been clear that a zero tolerance approach to infection control must be embedded in the ethos of all NHS staff to ensure that infection control rates continue to decline.

Further information can be found at http://www.nhsconfed.org/issues/issues-3110.cfm

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