Resources

In this episode of ‘Listen to THIS’,  podcast from the THIS Institute at Cambridge University, the hosts discuss learning from failure as essential for improvement,  to better understand what doesn’t work and why. 

Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce, led by Professor Mark Cormack, looked at the available evidence about health professionals’ ability to deliver on their full scope of practice in primary care. The review identified opportunities to remove the barriers stopping health professionals from working to their full scope of practice. It also drew on examples of multi-disciplinary teams where members are working to their full scope of practice to deliver best-practice primary care. Here, Mark presented some barriers and opportunities for health professionals to work at their full scope of practice.

We know that AI poses risks and also has potential for significant benefits.  In January 2024, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement Lucian Leape Institute convened an expert panel to review the literature and explore these benefits and risks as they relate to consumer safety, focusing what they considered to be key uses for genAI in health care: documentation support, clinical decision support, and consumer-facing chatbots. 

Evidence supporting the association between high organisational performance and the presence of clinicians in senior leadership and management roles is steadily growing. Clinical involvement in organisational leadership has been positively linked to operational efficiency and care quality improvements. This in-depth research report from The Health Foundation looks at what the NHS can gain from strengthening clinical leadership and management, the challenges involved in doing so and how they might be overcome. 

Specific research into home care quality is in its infancy, relative to other care settings.  This comprehensive study explores differences in healthcare outcomes between urban and rural home care settings, with a focus on two key quality metrics: hospital admissions and emergency room (ER) visit rates.

Is clinical governance lagging behind corporate  governance, despite years of focus? This article argues that healthcare governance and management are still skewed towards corporate and administrative functions. 

‘Safety culture is like a garden: to bloom, it must be planned, planted and  tended.’ This is a key message from a systematic review of safety culture and an excellent reminder that culture is never ‘set and forget’.

Medication errors remain a stubbornly challenging issue in the provision of safe care. Although we often associate inpatient settings with medication issues, this comprehensive review studied the triumvirate of prescribing, dispensing and administration to determine common causal factors of mistakes and inaccuracies, leading to incidents in ambulatory and outpatient settings.

There are many benefits of enhancing consumer and staff satisfaction in human services, but something we don’t often discuss is the potential financial advantage. Creating a great experience for both consumers and staff can be viewed as a professional and ethical imperative; and also as a strategic business investment.

Outpatient safety receives a different level of discussion and focus than inpatient safety. We may not consider that outpatients can experience harm in the same way that inpatients can, which could reduce the focus on collecting accurate outpatient incident data. But even outpatient care can cause life-threatening harm, as this study shows.