A Patient Safety Toolkit for general practice

Written by Professor Stephen Campbell and first posted on the NIHR Greater Manchester Patient Safety Translational Research Centre (Greater Manchester PSTRC) blog

The development and testing of a Patient Safety Toolkit for general practice has taken place over a number of years by a partnership of researchers at the Greater Manchester PSTRC in Nottingham (including Tony Avery, Brian Bell, Sarah Rodgers, Ndeshi Salema, Rachel Spencer ) and Manchester (including Stephen Campbell, Kathy Perryman) the NIHR School for Primary Care Research at the Universities of Birmingham, Keele, Oxford and Southampton, as well as the University of Exeter.

The Patient Safety Toolkit is hosted on the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) website. The RCGP is a network of over 52,000 family doctors. The Toolkit is important in preventing patients from being harmed. It is designed to be used by any general practice in the UK and covers the following topics:

• safe systems
• safety culture
• communication
• patient reported problems
• diagnostic safety
• prescribing safety

This range of topics addresses the fact that patient safety is complex and multidimensional. Improving patient safety requires preventing, identifying and addressing issues using practical and actionable information. The collection of tools is hosted on a single platform, which makes it easy to use and enables general practices to identify safety deficits. They can then review and change procedures to improve their patient safety across a key set of patient safety issues.

The research team has published a summary paper, which has been published in the Journal of Patient Safety: A Patient Safety Toolkit for Family Practices.