‘Safer Surgery Week’

Surgeons, doctors and nursing theatre staff working across hospitals run by The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust are supporting a new national patient safety campaign to promote safer surgery

1 More Image(s) In Gallery

Surgeons, doctors and nursing theatre staff working across hospitals run by The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust are supporting a new national patient safety campaign to promote safer surgery.

Safer Surgery Week 2012 will run from 24 – 30 September across the country.

The campaign is being led nationally by Patient Safety First and the Clinical Board for Surgical Safety to help improve the quality and reliability of local implementation of what is known as the five steps to safer surgery guidance across hospitals.

In June 2008, the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched a Global Patient Safety Challenge, ‘Safe Surgery Saves Lives’, to reduce the number of surgical deaths across the world. The initiative was designed to strengthen the commitment of clinical staff to address safety issues within the surgical setting. This included improving anaesthetic safety practices, ensuring correct site surgery, avoiding surgical site infections and improving communication and teamwork within the team.

All NHS Trusts in England now use the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for hospitals in order to provide safer surgical care.

Dr Sally Bradley, Medical Director at The Pennine Acute Trust is leading the Trust’s patient safety campaign. She said: “The safety and welfare of our patients receiving care and treatment across all our hospitals and services is our absolute top priority. Whether a patient is in A&E, attending an outpatient clinic or diagnostic test, as an inpatient on one of our wards or undergoing surgery in theatre or at a day surgery unit, we are committed to ensuring our services are as safe as possible.

“Following the introduction of the WHO Safe Surgery Saves Lives Checklist into this Trust in 2010, communication between our staff and clinical teams in theatres has improved. The checklist has been crucial in introducing safer surgery practices to reduce patient harm and surgical complications.

“This campaign will help focus staff and improve the quality and reliability of the Five Steps to Safer Surgery that form part of the WHO Safety Checklist. The guide is designed for use by team members involved in implementing the Surgical Safety Checklist, including briefing and debriefing our doctors and theatre staff.

“We are keen to continue to improve areas of patient safety to ensure our patients are receiving the best care, based on the best current practice. Through our involvement in the national Safety Express programme and by supporting and using this campaign locally to promote patient safety, we are determined to ensure our key practices and high standards are embedded into all our services.”

The Pennine Acute Trust runs North Manchester General Hospital, The Royal Oldham Hospital, Fairfield General Hospital in Bury and Rochdale Infirmary.

This year marks the fourth year of National Patient Safety First Week. Launched in June 2008, the campaign aims to establish an NHS with no avoidable deaths, or no avoidable harm to patients, and to ensure that staff’s top priority is patient safety.

More information can be found at www.patientsafetyfirst.nhs.uk