Project summary

Background

Patient safety science strives to minimise errors and adverse events in patient care – a goal that patient safety researchers and practitioners aim to achieve via the development and implementation of interventions that have been shown to reduce the potential for human error or omission, and to improve the reliability and safety in care delivery. Such interventions include care ‘bundles’, safety checklists and skills training.

When errors occur, a critical task of the healthcare system is to have mechanisms in place to acknowledge and analyse the errors. In addition to the obvious task of dealing with the consequences of the error that may have reached the patient and their family, a healthcare organisation that strives to become safer aims to provide feedback to the individual care providers and teams involved and to derive lessons from the error.

Errors aside, regular performance feedback is a broader element of performance improvement – across a number of industries individuals and teams receive regular feedback on their performance, with the aim of knowing their standards and of improving in the future.

We carry out research across a range of areas broadly related to feedback and learning both from errors but also of good clinical performance. Browse the links below to find out more about our research in this area.

• Embedding Patient Safety into Postgraduate Medical Education
• Debriefing
• Improving the Quality of Morbidity and Mortality (M&M) Meetings