Mitigating patient safety incidents with intelligent tech – Molly speaks to HSJ

Molly Kent, Patient Safety Specialist at Radar Healthcare, spoke to HSJ recently about how patient safety incidents cannot be eradicated but instead mitigated.  

“Working together and maximising the benefits of intelligent technology can have a truly transformative impact on claims – not to mention on the lives of staff and patients.” 

NHS Resolution’s annual report, published in July, shows that clinical negligence claims have been rising in the NHS; it received 12,629 claims in 2020-21, up 7.5%. Organisations have systems and processes in place to mitigate clinical negligence and improve patient safety, so why is this happening? 

“We need to have a real understanding of the larger patient safety landscape if we want to get to a position where numbers of claims are decreasing instead of increasing – and the only way to do this is by using intelligent technology.” 

Molly explains how we shouldn’t only be looking at individual claims in isolation, instead we should be looking at them together in order to identify common issues and build a big picture. 

“One positive point is that, in the last 18 months or so, there has been an increased appetite for digital in the NHS. This allows organisations to have greater visibility across a system and to use technology to better understand activity across the system. Smarter use of digital gives insights across a whole system’s data, as well as removing manual overheads and human errors.” 

The data presented from across a whole organisation is incredibly beneficial, but only if used correctly. Fortunately, nowadays there is no need to bring in staff to manually integrate, redact and scan data to get an idea of what’s going on. Intelligent technology can do this for you, but also go a step further by helping to drive continuous improvement. For example, indentifying risks early on, auditing processes, and sharing best practice across an organisation through excellence reporting. 

Read the full article on HSJ’s website