What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can we improve across system boundaries?​

Patient Safety Together (PST) collaborates with people who work in and use our health services to co-develop resources that share patient safety learning. We use up-to-date information including incident management data and national and international evidence to learn from incidents, research and data, and learn directly from patients, service users and staff. Resources include HSE National Patient Safety Alerts (NPSA), including supporting infographic ‘What does it me for me as a patient or service user?’, Patient Safety Supplements and Patient Safety Stories. All resources are freely available to access and download (www.hse.ie/pst/).

Our ultimate challenge is to reach our key audience, the front-line and public. We want to make sure that the sometimes critical patient safety learning and resources co-developed reaches everyone whom it is relevant to, such as frontline nurses, community physiotherapists and service users. This project will boost the culture, capabilities and structures needed for learning and improvement.

What does your project aim to achieve?

A multidisciplinary team including patient advocates and staff will co-design a multimedia resource pack for healthcare services and patient advocacy groups. The pack will improve our ability to share patient safety learning by enabling us to reach people that may not be aware of the PST programme and its offerings, or have not engaged yet. It will identify more diverse ways to spread learning and help close the loop on patient safety incidents. It will also support services in planning and performance by helping embed a culture of patient centeredness, sharing of learning and patient safety improvement further.

The multimedia ‘pack’ will incorporate novel and innovative ways of reaching our key audiences including tangible material (leaflets, posters, banners) and digital resources (electronic posters, digital presentations, videos) that will showcase PST work, highlight available resources and encourage people to become involved.

How will the project be delivered?

Phase 1: Convene a project group including healthcare and social care staff, patient advocates and experts in improvement science, design thinking and human factors. Co-develop a project plan to help identify challenges, gaps, deliverables and priorities.

Phase 2: Co-design a suite of resources that will encourage people to access and explore patient safety learning resources. Identify support required and the different areas that resource packs will be provided to including additional supports for individual services.

Phase 3: Use improvement methodology to test the resource pack with services and groups. Adapt pack to address feedback and use PDSA cycles to test improvements. Finalise logistical requirements.

Phase 4: Launch the resource pack, supported by a communications campaign, including virtual and in-person sessions.

Business as usual: Evaluate the success and usefulness of the resource pack yearly as part of the overall evaluation of the PST programme. Continue to keep pack updated as required.

How is your project going to share learning?

The project will generate valuable learning by encouraging staff to use its content as a rich resource to apply relevant learning to support improvements, including closing the loop on incident reporting and review. This will encourage staff to engage further with incident reporting. Patients and service users will be supported to easily access information on quality and patient safety issues that are relevant to healthcare and keep them up to date with the latest information. The project will reassure anyone involved in a patient safety incident that by actively sharing learning we aim to prevent similar incidents recurring. By widening the audience of people engaging with the PST work the project will further expand the ability to identify, co-develop and share patient safety learning. Finally resources will be freely accessible for Q members to access and download through the existing PST website www.hse.ie/pst/