While healthcare brings enormous benefits, errors in medicine are common and patients are frequently harmed. These incidents are serious for patients and a massive and relentless drain on scarce healthcare resources. The Clinical Safety Research Unit (CSRU) was established in Imperial College in September 2002 with an initial grant from Smith and Nephew Foundation. The current programme builds on research developed over 15 years at the Clinical Risk Unit, University College London. The CSRU was established to carry out research on safety in healthcare with the aim of understanding the nature, scale and causes of harm and of making healthcare safer for patients and their families. Our aim is to carry out research directly aimed at enhancing the safety of healthcare and, equally important, providing a training environment for clinicians and researchers.
Patient safety has evolved rapidly in the last few years. There is now a much greater awareness of the scale of error and harm. Conceptual understanding has advanced considerably, but is not yet strongly supported by empirical work. The naive optimism that the problem could be ‘just fixed' is giving way to a more sober assessment of the scale of the challenge of safe healthcare.
The CSRU is part of the Department of Biosurgery and Surgical Technology at Imperial College
The CSRU website describes work that the Unit has undertaken before 2007. More recent work can be found within the research themes of this site.