The patient safety specialist and patient safety partner programmes: a national evaluation

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Background

Like many healthcare systems worldwide, the NHS in England faces challenges in keeping patients safe. Over several decades, there have been efforts to improve patient safety, and while there have been notable successes, progress has been slow and sometimes frustrating. There is increasing recognition of the limitations of some of the approaches and techniques used to try and improve patient safety, along with an interest in exploring new ideas from other industries.

In 2019, the NHS Patient Safety Strategy reviewed the progress, current challenges, and future opportunities facing patient safety in England, outlined plans for improving patient safety, and introduced two key roles: patient safety specialists and patient safety partners.

Patient safety specialists – appointed by all NHS organisations (providers and integrated care boards) since 2020 – are NHS staff who focus on assuring and improving safety. They receive advanced training and work with others inside and outside their organisations to lead safety efforts.
Patient safety partners – patients, carers, and members of the public – are recruited by NHS organisations to help improve patient safety by providing an outsider’s perspective. Their role is to make sure that patients and carers are “present, powerful and involved at all levels of healthcare” in the way envisaged by experts following the Mid Staffordshire inquiry.

These roles have potential, but it is important to assess them carefully to get a sense of whether and how they are working, and what could be improved.

Building on an earlier smaller-scale evaluation of the patient safety specialist role already completed by THIS Institute, this programme will look at the two roles – separately and together – and their evolution in a range of different settings around the NHS.

Approach

The study will take a mixed methods approach.

We will interview people from other high-risk industries where ensuring safety is vital, in the UK and overseas, to learn about how similar roles work in those sectors, and to see if there are useful lessons for patient safety specialists and patient safety partners.

Building on our earlier research into patient safety specialists, we will conduct two more surveys to learn about their backgrounds, roles, and activities. We will regularly collect data about patient safety specialists over a total of four years to understand how their role evolves. We will also examine the advanced training that specialists receive and see whether and how this applies in their day-to-day work.

For the patient safety partner role, we will speak with people involved in creating and introducing the role to understand how it is supposed to work in practice and then develop a ‘theory of change’ to explore how the patient safety partner role works to improve patient safety: what steps need to happen, what challenges might arise, and what impact is expected over time.

As with the patient safety specialists, we will then run two surveys at different points in time to look at how the role is evolving.

We will study how the two roles function, both separately and together, by using case studies of a range of diverse types of NHS organisation – from hospitals to community services.

Throughout the project, we will work together with an expert collaborative group which includes patient safety specialists, patient safety partners, policymakers, safety experts, and members of the public.

Project team