Safer staffing in community hospitals is a key patient safety and workforce issue and questions relating to how it can be determined is a question asked by many leaders working in that setting.
Safer staffing tools have been or are being developed for acute hospitals and community nursing teams but little has been done in relation to this topic in the community hospital setting. Community hospitals are a unique practice area and do not sit neatly within either model. There are well established links between workforce numbers, skills, competence and patient safety making this an important issue to be explored.
This online discussion was an opportunity to learn from the knowledge, expertise and insight of Professor Alison Leary and Helen Hughes.
This call was organised by Q’s Special Interest Group, Community Hospitals SIG: sharing good practice.
Biographies:
Professor Alison Leary, Chair of Healthcare and Workforce Modelling at London South Bank University and Director of the International Community Nursing Observatory (ICNO)
Alison Leary undertakes projects around the modelling of complex systems in health care. Alison’s interests are in the complexity of health care, mathematical models and data science. She is a registered nurse and is particularly interested in specialist and advanced practice. Alison is the Director of ICNO which was launched by the QNI in 2019 to analyse data and trends in the community nursing workforce data in greater depth, to aid understanding of the challenges faced by services.
Helen Hughes, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Learning
Helen’s passion for improved patient safety is informed by personal family insight into the impact of unsafe care and the ineffectiveness of organisational responses to learn from error. Helen is an experienced leader in organisational effectiveness and transformational change. She has held leadership roles in health care in the UK, the World Health Organization and the National Patient Safety Agency. Helen’s previous leadership roles in patient safety include, as Director of Operations of the National Patient Safety Agency, designing the first patient safety infrastructure and policy framework for the NHS in England, and Director of the National Reporting and Learning System.