Why PATIENTSTORIES?

Murray Anderson-Wallace 

Whilst most practitioners, managers and clinicians might accept that the experience of the people that they care for and treat is an important aspect of patient safety improvement, the practices associated with this work are still relatively new and underdeveloped.

Engaging patients, relatives and carers in ways that use their knowledge and experience to directly influence and build the safety culture is a key frontier for those who are interested more than incremental improvements.

This is without doubt difficult and challenging work. Regrettably, we still work in a system where individual blame and recrimination are the norm.

Openness, honesty and a willingness to learn from error all form part of the processes of “truth and reconciliation” that we all should expect, and that patients and carers deserve.  It is challenging but vital work.

And that is what PATIENTSTORIES is meant to be about – creating the condition for challenging but vital conversations.

In this context working with PATIENTSTORIES needs to be thoughtfully and carefully approached and it is with this in mind that we have tried to develop a range of support processes and materials that will be useful in this regard.

The detail is all around the website but in a nutshell what we can offer includes:

• Access to a growing library of films and associated resources (on-line and in DVD format) that offer purposeful PATIENTSTORIES with messages that can be discussed, debated and generalised
• Workshops that explore the power of PATIENTSTORIES and how and when they can be used to influence the climate of opinion (internally and externally) around safety improvements
• Consultancy support to help organisations integrate PATIENTSTORIES into their overall strategies for patient safety improvement
• Production advice and support to help organisations develop their own PATIENTSTORIES for local use.

I hope you will find this site and its products of value – we want you to let us know. There are plenty of places throughout the site to comment and contribute and we’ve linked up with a couple of social media sites to help spread the word too.

Finally, I just want to express my grateful to all those people who have willing contributed their time and ideas to get us to this stage.

As well as making their practical skills and experiences as patients, carers, healthcare professionals, policy-makers, journalists, film-makers, educators and improvement specialists available to us, they have provided fantastic feedback, critique and encouragement.

I hope you will too.