Accidents in hospital contradict the purpose of healthcare: to make people better. Dr Nicola Burgess and Professor Graeme Currie investigated how to improve patient safety at two hospital trusts. Working closely with medical staff, the project changed attitudes to Patient Safety Incidents (PSI) and prevented future accidents.
Treating people who fall in hospital (often the elderly), costs the NHS more than £2 billion annually. The existing tool to investigate PSIs was unfit for purpose. It too often encouraged a box-ticking approach to analyse accidents, and didn’t result in improvements to services.
The Warwick research team developed new processes to promote better ways of working and disseminate knowledge more freely. Improvements have directly benefited patients, with the NUHT registering a 50% drop in the number of falls, which is estimated to have prevented more than 100 hip fractures and saved 60 lives. The lessons learnt by HEFT and NUHT are now spreading further afield through professional networks keen to improve hospital care.
https://warwick.ac.uk/research/impact/social-sciences/wbs/hospital-falls
