Patient Safety Congress 2009 will be held 30 April - 1 May 2009 at the ICC Birmingham. Patient Safety Congress 2008 in London last May was a highly successful event with 800 delegates and over 100 speakers. The Health Service Journal and Nursing Times have again teamed up with the NPSA, the NHS Institute...

Only just finding time to get back into the Forum after very heavy recent workloads..... so sorry this is a bit late, and in abreviated text, it comes from a questionnair I recently filled out for Gael......!. QP4 already on Oncology system when I arrived in post, but was not being used as no one understood...

This is something we had issues with as well. But we now have trained assessors, who then assess the competencies of others. The assessors are at all levels of the structure to cover the various levels of competencies. There is always the question of who assesses the assessors - but we have used an accredited...

The third annual Auditors’ Local Evaluation (ALE) report from the Audit Commission , published on 2 October, shows an overall picture of financial improvement for many NHS organisations in England in 2007/08. Half of the 302 NHS trusts and primary care trusts (PCTs) assessed in England have performed...

A new monograph from the Center for Healthcare Governance in the USA describes how hospitals boards can weave quality and patient safety into the fabric of their organisations. In Putting Quality First: How Boards Can Make Quality Improvement a Higher Priority , the author, David Bjork discusses formal...

Within healthcare, efficient and effective document management ensures that staff can access up-to-date information that is specific and relevant to them. This enables staff to follow the latest processes and procedures, which could enhance the quality of service delivery and patient care. In maintaining...

The Darzi report High Quality Care for All signalled a shift to better quality care being the main theme of NHS reforms in England. Consequently, quality will become an issue that will be at the centre of most systems of governance in the NHS. According to Jon Sussex and Adrian Towse, writing in the...

The cleanliness of most NHS hospitals in England is threatened by frequent invasions of rats, fleas, bedbugs, flies and cockroaches, a report claims. Figures released by the Conservatives show that 70% of NHS Trusts brought in the pest controllers at least 50 times between January 2006 and March 2008...

A safety checklist designed to cut the risk of surgical complications is to be circulated to doctors world-wide. The list has been drawn up by the World Health Organization (WHO), which says half of complications resulting from major surgery may be preventable. A Lancet study found that basic safety...

Hi Martin Thank you for your reply I am thinking of this from Two directions 1 - Staff members need to have records of their accidents in and around the lab i.e. needle stick injuries, cuts, trips breaks. also we need to log accidents that are major as IR1s as well - we do this as CA/PAs at the moment...