Implementing Patient Safety: Addressing Culture, Conditions and Values to Help People Work Safely

Over the last two decades across the globe we have seen a multitude of programs, projects and books to help improve the safety of patient care in healthcare. However, the full potential of these has not yet been reached.

Most of the current approaches are top down, programmatic and target driven. These look at problems in isolation one harm at a time with simplistic solutions that fail to support a holistic, systematic approach. They are focused on collecting incident data and learning from failure using tools that are not fit for purpose in a complex nonlinear system. Very rarely do the solutions help build the conditions, cultures and behaviours that support a safer system and help the people involved work safely.

Healthcare is stuck in a relentlessly negative approach to safety. Those working in patient safety and healthcare are struggling, and books on patient safety to date instruct the reader to continue doing the same things we have been doing for the last 20 years.

This book uniquely combines the latest thinking in safety, including creating a balanced approach to learning from what works as a way to understand why it fails, together with the evidence on building a just culture, positive workplaces and working relationships that we now know are so important for safety. It helps people understand how to address issues despite their complexities and improve safety with practical ways to truly understand what day to day healthcare work is actually like, rather than what people imagine it is like.

This book builds on the author’s first book Rethinking Patient Safety which exposed what we need to do differently to truly transform our approach to patient safety. It updates the reader further on the concepts explored in the first book but also vitally helps readers understand the ‘how’.

goes beyond the rhetoric and provides the reader with ideas and examples for how the latest thinking can actually be achieved. It is based on the author’s personal experience of leading a national culture change campaign in the National Health Service for five years. The lessons arise from helping hundreds of organisations and people rethink and implement a whole new way of thinking about improving patient safety in healthcare.

Dr Suzette Woodward works in the English National Health Service (NHS). She is an internationally renowned expert in patient safety and has been studying safety in healthcare settings since the 1990s. Her particular areas of interest include implementation of patient safety and the translation of theory and public policy into practice. She has an exceptional ability to take complex issues and make them easy to understand as well as being able to weave together different threads in a unique and stimulating way.

Suzette is a trained general and paediatric nurse who specialised in paediatric intensive care nursing for over ten years. She has a Master’s in Clinical Risk and a Doctorate in Patient Safety and was the recipient of the Ken Goulding Prize for Professional Excellence in 2008. Her research focused on implementation of national patient safety guidance. She is also a visiting professor for Imperial College University in London. Suzette was awarded the Daisy Ayris Medal for services to perioperative nursing in 2011, named one of the top 50 inspirational women in the NHS in 2013, one of the top 50 nurse leaders in the NHS in 2014 and one of the top clinical leaders in the NHS in 2014.

Her first book, Rethinking Patient Safety, and the accompanying blogs have helped shape the conversation on thinking differently about safety in healthcare and she is a sought-after speaker at international and national conferences, workshops, symposia and meetings, having delivered over 200 keynote addresses on patient safety.