Learning from failure in healthcare
Learning from mistakes is a crucial part of healthcare improvement, and as humans, we tend to focus on the negatives. But if we concentrate on just the mistakes, are we actually hindering progress? In this episode host Graham Martin and guests Jane O ‘Hara, Helen Crump and James McGowan discuss how learning from failure can help the NHS and healthcare systems around the world. The wide-ranging discussion covers:
- Positive bias in quality improvement
- Differences in academic research and service investigations
- The valuable insights we gain from when things go right – and when things go wrong.
About our guests
Graham Martin is Director of Research at THIS Institute, where he leads applied research programmes and contributes to the Institute’s strategy and development. Graham’s research interest and experience is in undertaking studies and evaluation in relation to healthcare improvement, from major policy-driven programmes to locally led initiatives.
Jane O’Hara is a patient safety researcher with extensive experience of developing and evaluating interventions to improve the safety of care. She is a Director of Research at THIS Institute.
Helen Crump’s research interests include quality improvement, user experience of care co-ordination and inequalities. Her PhD fellowship explores factors that influence the way negative results of service improvement are interpreted and shared, and how organisations and systems might become more receptive to reporting and learning from failure.
James McGowan is a Consultant in Health Protection at the UK Health Security Agency. His research area is in generating evidence to support NHS organisations and clinical services to improve the quality and safety of care provided to patients.
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