Safer Salford…One Year On

Delivery of the Safer Salford programme began in April 2016, supported by a Programme Board bringing together representatives from across health and social care in Salford. During the first year of the programme, each workstream has taken shape and grown momentum, supported by a dedicated team in Haelo. Our 1 year progress report is now available and to coincide with its publication, we are reflecting on some of the highlights of the programme so far:

Safer Leadership

Leaders from across Salford have attended 3 learning sessions, drawing on expertise from national safety leads, such as Professor Charles Vincent, and other industries to see how they learn from data. Each learning session provided a different focus though the various lenses of the Vincent Framework and participants have begun to take their learning about the framework and apply it to their daily roles.

“It made me think again about safe implementation of IAT services in a different way…….[I’m] looking forward to getting feedback from the group” – Ilse Berge, Stroke Consultant working on redesign of the spinal pathway 

Safer Culture

10 Salford GP practices have piloted different tools to learn about their safety culture. The purpose of using a safety culture tool within a team is to surface what works well and what could be improved within the team and come up with an action plan to make improvements.

“Suggestions made in the debrief were really valuable, and we have implemented a lot from that day” – Practice manager participating in the Safer Culture pilot.

Safer Intelligence

Building on a scoping exercise conducted early in the programme, we have consulted with a wide range of subject matter experts from across our 5 partner organisations, identifying more than 150 potential measures of system safety, distilling these into an innovative dashboard of 15 interactive measures. The dashboard was launched on 28^th June 2017 and can be viewed here.

“I think it says a lot about the work that you’re doing that the information that you’re opening up and displaying is already influencing practice. As a direct result of the information on the dashboard, we’re now reviewing the scale of the falls PIID to make sure our proposals are scaled in proportion to the sort of change we need to see.” – Ben Fryer, Public Health Specialty Registrar

Safer Handover

Over 100 clinicians gave us their views on quality of handovers between primary and secondary care. Taking this feedback on board, we brought together a multi-disciplinary team for a rapid improvement event (RIE) with the aim of improving referrals into secondary care, and completion of follow up actions on transfer of care from secondary to primary care .

A key outcome from the event reported by attendees was the ability to work together with colleagues to co-design solutions. Attendees reported their main take home message as “working collaborative we can make a change!” and “we are committed to improvement and change.”

Safer Care Homes

Managers and staff from 9 Salford care homes are now actively engaged in this ambitious Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BTS) which aims to improve resident safety. Care home teams are embracing Improvement Science, conducting their own PDSA cycles and sharing best practice with each other via our popular ‘Peer Exchange Visits’.

“We like that we can all share our information and ideas with other care homes and can see the negative and positive points. Also the feeling of support of everybody and how it can benefit us all.” – a senior care worker at Ecclesholme Care Home on the benefits of peer exchange visits

Safer Medicines

In this work stream, which was a late addition to the programme, we have identified a number of medicines safety initiatives currently taking place across Salford that could potentially be scaled up. A first draft report has been submitted to Programme Board and the full report will be available shortly.