Education and Training
Systems and processes have been the primary focus of much work on safety and quality, an important reaction to the crude blaming of individuals for safety problems. However this has led to a neglect of the role individuals play in maintaining safety and quality.
This programme focuses on the skills that staff need to identify hazards and errors at both personal, team and service levels and to feel empowered to make the necessary changes or ensure that these are highlighted to others more able to implement the changes. These skills develop with experience but are seldom made explicit or formally taught. However, we believe that it may be possible to train people in foresight, anticipation of error and error recovery techniques to enhance their role as `harm absorbers’ to use James Reason’s evocative phrase.
In order to address this gap we are developing and evaluating training programmes for clinical staff to enhance their safety skills by providing information on safety awareness skills and knowledge using the hazard indicators and incident vignettes.
As part of this strand we are also developing ways to incorporate safety and quality teaching throughout the medical curriculum. Initial modules will be piloted with Imperial College with the eventual aim of successful programmes being disseminated more widely in conjunction with deaneries, Royal Colleges and other education and training institutions.