Patient safety: the devil is in the data

With the recent announcement from Matt Hancock about reducing bureaucracy and the publication of the consultation document, ‘Busting bureaucracy: empowering frontline staff by reducing excess bureaucracy in the health and care system in England’,¹ the time is ripe to look at how managing data more efficiently and applying the experiences of high reliability organisations can have a dramatic impact on patient safety.

The CQC is taking an in-depth look at how health and care services work together and how they can evolve in order to meet people’s needs and improve outcomes for all concerned. In doing so, patient safety is being pushed firmly to the top of the agenda. 

As eloquently argued in ‘Still Not Safe’ by Robert L. Wears and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, the modern patient safety movement (now in its third decade) has yet to realise its potential. They argue that, for the potential to be realised, healthcare has to embrace the expert process and knowledge of safety science. To quote: “change will require health professionals to … develop truly substantive and equal co-partnership with safety scientists”.