Patient Involvement in Patient Safety
Our Projects
We have a number of projects underway, and you can find out more about some of our key projects below.
Patients as prompts: Promoting early diagnosis in primary care
One of the key research projects in our theme is the development and testing of a tool to support patients and primary care healthcare professionals in achieving a faster cancer diagnosis in primary care. Our tool may help to support safety netting within a primary care consultation, particularly for vague symptoms that may be related to cancer, and guide patients in making decisions about when to come back if symptoms persist, become more severe or change. You can find out more about this project here.
How do staff use and respond to patient feedback to inform improvements to the quality and safety of care in a hospital setting?
We recognise that patient engagement can take many forms, and one of our other key research projects is exploring how patients provide feedback about the quality and safety of their care online. Our research aims to understand how organisations respond to patient feedback delivered online, and to do this, we are partnering with Care Opinion – the UK’s largest independent, not-for-profit repository for online patient feedback. You can find out more about this project here.
Plugging in the safety gaps: Exploring an integrative approach to gather safety information from patients in primary care
Patients have expressed growing interest in having access to their personal health information, and internationally there has been increasing policy focus on patient and care records being more accessible. This project aims to explore the feasibility and acceptability of using a digital, integrative approach to gathering quality and safety information from patients about their care from the perspectives of patients and primary care staff. You can find out more about this project here.
Service user and carer involvement in the safety of mental healthcare services
While there has been a significant research focus on patient safety within acute hospital and primary care settings, there has been much less research into the identification of safety issues in UK mental healthcare services, despite continuing serious failures in service provision. This project aims to progress our understanding of service user and carer involvement in mental healthcare safety. You can find out more about this project here.
Exploring patient safety for people with learning disabilities
People with learning disabilities die at a rate far greater than the general population and from conditions which could be prevented or treated with good quality care. This project aims to explore patient safety for people with learning disabilities. You can find out more about this project here.
Exploring the experience of raising a concern or making a complaint in an adult acute mental health inpatient setting
Feedback is an important part of understanding the safety and quality of health services and the ‘experiential’ aspect of complaining about an individual’s care maybe an under researched aspect of the UK NHS mental health system. This project will also seek to explore ‘why’ certain actions are taken, ‘why’ certain paths followed and ‘why’ people have the experiences that they do. You can find out more about this project here.
Involving patients in recognising clinical deterioration in hospital
There have been a number of initiatives to encourage patient involvement in patient safety. One area of patient safety that might benefit from the involvement of patients is improving the early detection of clinical deterioration in hospital. Preliminary evidence suggests that patient-reported wellness may be a precursor for subsequent improvement or decline in their condition as indicated by objective measurements of their health, out project aims to explore this on a larger scale. You can find out more about this project here.
Patient and family involvement in serious incident investigations
(The 'Learn Together' study)
Policy and regulatory organisations have proposed greater involvement of patients and families in serious incident investigations, to support better learning. This project aims to co-design processes and resources to guide the role of patients and families in serious incident investigations at a national, and local level, and to test these processes to understand their impact upon experience, learning and likelihood of seeking legal recourse. You can find out more about this project here.
Exploring the response to the COVID-19 pandemic:
Co-creating healthcare system resilience
Healthcare system resilience is a theory that has emerged over the past five years, that seeks to explore, describe and support health services to adapt and respond to variability in demand and resources. This project aims to explore the role of those who sit just outside of the healthcare system, in supporting the resilience of that system. We want to understand and document what people are doing to support the safety of their health, the health of others, and how people use the healthcare system in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find out more about this project here.