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.
Morag Morrison says
Congratulations on this initiative. It is really important that the whole story of the patient’s journey is heard and taken apart and analysed to contribute to patient safety and quality. For every person’s unique story there are many hundreds – and possibly more – who can relate to at least one or more aspect of that story, whether it be a simple issue or a more complicated one. There are so many things that might appear ‘minor’ or ‘insignificant’ to the onlooker which impact hugely on that patient, and which often takes very little or no time, money or other resources to fix – resulting in a major difference to the life of the patient and their outcome.
Murray Anderson-Wallace says
Morag – thank you very much for your comments. We’ve had some really very positive feedback on the work we have done so far. It’s really important for those of us on the creative team as well as those who share their stories and make other contributions to know that the work is having an impact.
I think that this media really helps to draw out the things that may seem “minor” or “insignificant”and I am constantly amazed by the things that others see in our stories that had not necessarily occurred to me.
Our aim is to open up conversations, debate and discussion and it is great to know that this is being achieved.
Val Nixon says
I am currently doing a Phd on patient safety. My aim is to look at the use of patient stories to improve the safety culture but still in the early stages of narrowing the subject down. Have you researched this initiative to see if this does have an impact on improving patient safety?
Murray Anderson-Wallace says
Hi Val,
We’re currently working with the Trent Simulation And Skills Centre and Nottingham University Medical Centre, which includes some basic research of impact in undergraduate medical education. We hope to publish this work in the summer of 2014. Other literature does exist about the impact of patient stories on safety but it is a relatively new and under researched area. We’d love to do move work on this but time and funds don’t allow this at the moment.