Patient Safety in Ireland

In the UK, 30-70% of negative events in hospitals are potentially preventable. 17% of those hospitalised in the UK are affected by at least one event, and 5.2% of these events result in a death. In Ireland specifically, between 2010 and 2018 the claims and other costs resulting from safety failures amounted to €1,391.8 million. 

The Patient Safety Strategy 2019-2024 was onboarded in December 2019 to work towards improving the above statistics in Ireland. There are 6 commitments included to ensure harm is decreased across healthcare.

The 6 commitments:

1 – Empower and engage patients to improve patient safety: It’s important to accurately gain feedback from patients in order to improve patient safety. Radar Healthcare’s software allows you to easily log compliments and complaints, as well as claims, and help you to spot trends in the data through analytics. Once patterns are established, you can be proactive and tackle the issues that are flagged. This strategy empowers patients by showing that change is brought about by their feedback. 

2 – Empower staff to improve patient safety: Your employees are at the heart of your organisation, and ensuring they are heard is crucial. Encourage them to provide feedback and ideas for how patient safety can be improved, and to share learning to help others. When feeling empowered, staff are likely to feel motivated to improve patient experiences. 

3 – Anticipate and respond to risks to patient safety: It’s often not enough to be reactive to risks; being proactive is a much safer approach. Radar Healthcare spots trends and alerts any relevant roles, as well as automatically assigning actions and triggering processes to be carried out off the back of any issues. This allows you to respond proactively and improve your patient safety. 

4 – Reduce common causes of harm: Encourage your staff to log any event which causes harm, or any near misses. Over time, you will be able to see common causes of harm and anticipate these. Radar Healthcare’s state of the art analytics software notifies relevant staff members if a pattern of harmful patient safety events occurs. This helps the identification of instances which commonly cause issues so that they can be improved. 

5 – Using information to improve patient safety: information is key, and our patient safety software collates everything you need in one centralised place. From events and risks to workflows, action plans and analytics, Radar Healthcare is your go to place. 

6 – Provide effective leadership and governance to improve patient safety: An organisation should have leadership which encourages a healthy and open culture. Radar Healthcare’s software helps you to do this. It encourages an open culture of shared learning so that no matter how many departments, locations or services you may have, they can all learn from each other and drive patient safety improvement together. 

The 6 points above are essential for Irish healthcare organisations to work towards in order to improve patient safety. Using the right software for your organisation is paramount in aiding you; see why Radar Healthcare may be the right choice for your patient safety strategy.