About Patient Safety Together: learning, sharing and improving

Patient Safety Together is the sharing of learning component of the patient safety programme to support the HSE Patient Safety Strategy. It is coordinated by the Quality and Patient Safety Incident Management Team (QPSIM) of the National Quality and Patient Safety Directorate (NQPSD)

Outputs are shared on this freely available online platform that enables all users to access and download new and up-to-date quality and patient safety information.

What is Patient Safety Together?

Patient Safety Together was created to:

Build on the work routinely undertaken by our healthcare services and identify new opportunities to share patient safety learning.
Develop a standardised and easily accessible approach to sharing quality and patient safety (QPS) learning within Irish healthcare
Help support and close the loop on incident reporting by sharing learning to help prevent the recurrence of incidents.

Purpose

If you are a staff member working in healthcare services in Ireland and would like to refer:

Support staff
- to use its content as a rich resource to identify and apply relevant learning for quality and patient safety improvements at all levels
- to engage with incident reporting, facilitating closing the loop on incident reporting and review by supporting sharing of learning
Support patients/service users
- to easily access information on quality and patient safety issues that are relevant to healthcare services and to keep them up to date with the latest information
Reassure anyone involved in a patient safety incident that by identifying and sharing learning we aim to prevent similar incidents recurring

If you would like to refer potential content to the PST Learning Team for consideration, please complete the Referral Template to PST Learning Team (DOCX, 1 page 0.07MB)

Development

Patient Safety Together was co-developed using a collaborative approach with a wide representation of interested and dedicated people who both work in and use the health services in Ireland.

Patient Safety Community

We are building a national community for staff working in quality and patient safety in the HSE/HSE-funded services to offer peer support and collaboration. This community is dedicated to QPS staff. Please contact patientsafetytogether@hse.ie if you are interested in joining.

How will Patient Safety Together support improvement?

Patient Safety Together supports learning, sharing and improving for patient safety:

Learning: The learning generated through Patient Safety Learning is identified through analysis of available data sets including incident report data (using the National Incident Management System (NIMS)), audit reports, complaints data, other published national and international safety alerts and research. To identify relevant learning this analysis is carried out by a dedicated Patient Safety Together Learning Team and a multidisciplinary multiagency HSE NPSA Committee
Sharing: All publications are distributed to all users via the online platform Patient Safety Together. In addition, HSE National Patient Safety Alerts are distributed to HSE NPSA officers via an eAlert System.
Improving: Patient Safety Together publications aim to share learning with staff to support them in preventing similar incidents from recurring whilst making improvements to patient safety.

Evaluation

Read the Patient Safety Together Evaluation Plan (PDF, 13 pages, 0.7MB)

Local Resources

More information

Further information on alerts, supplements and stories can be found at the following links:

You can also contact the Patient Safety Together Learning Team at patientsafetytogether@hse.ie for further information.

Back to Patient Safety Together: learning, sharing and improving

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