Patient Safety Specialist

at  NHS Shropshire Telford and Wrekin Integrated Care Board

The NHS Patient Safety Strategy set the ambition for the new role of patient safety specialist to be introduced in every NHS organisation in England.
We have an exciting opportunity to join Shropshire Telford and Wrekin ICB in this critical role. You will be working on patient safety with our Experience, Safety and Risk team and in partnership with key functions in quality, safety, workforce and improvement to underpin high quality patient care.
You will provide dynamic, senior leadership, visibility, and expert support to the patient safety work of the ICB. You will support patient safety culture and safety systems and engage directly with local providers.
You will lead, and support patient safety improvement activity and ensure that systems thinking, human factors understanding and restorative just and learning culture principles are embedded in all patient safety processes.
The patient safety specialist role was identified in the NHS patient safety strategy (2019) and is the key patient safety expert in the organisation working full time on patient safety. In some organisations, this role may be shared where it is not possible for a single role to be dedicated solely to patient safety as defined within the Identifying patient safety specialists publication (2020). For example, this may include responsibilities for clinical work or management of wider areas of governance that do not sit directly within the patient safety remit.
The patient safety specialist provides compassionate and collaborative senior leadership, visibility and expert support to the patient safety work within the organisation. This role supports the development of a patient safety culture and safety systems and requires sufficient seniority to engage directly with the executive team (or the equivalent level of leadership in organisations without executives). They have a key role in supporting the Quality team to understand the most effective approaches to improving patient safety, and ensuring that any patient safety-related responsibilities held by different executives are effectively aligned.

Our goal as an organisation is to lead and support delivery of the four Integrated Care System (ICS) aims across STW.

• Improving outcomes in population health and care
• Tackling inequalities in outcomes, experience, and access
• Enhancing productivity and value for money
• Helping the NHS to support broader social and economic development.

All staff are required to model the values of the organisation detailed below, to support the ICB to successfully deliver these aims. Our Values & Behaviours
We embody compassion, respect, drive, and integrity in our unique role within the STW health and care system. We value diverse contributions, drawing on the expertise and experience of local people, staff and partners, alongside high-quality intelligence to serve our communities effectively.
The below measures help assess how effectively we foster a compassionate culture, communicate our optimism, engage with stakeholders to drive positive change, are transparent in decision making and ensure our efforts are aligned with the priorities of our communities to address health outcomes and inequalities.
Ambition. Our commitment to success is shown through supporting and trusting our people to tackle challenging tasks with integrity and creativity.
Compassion. Our shared purpose, supported by our empathetic, inclusive approach where the contributions of all are valued as we work together to reduce inequalities.
The patient safety specialist is responsible for and may directly lead or support, patient safety understanding, involvement and improvement activity and ensures that systems thinking, human factors understanding and just culture principles are embedded in all patient safety processes. This includes ensuring that their organisation have effective processes in place that cross directorate or divisional structures and that these link effectively to national safety systems. This role includes supporting the organisation to ensure that the patient is at the centre of all patient safety activity.
The post holder will work closely and collaboratively with those within the organisation who already have specific patient safety responsibilities. Several patient safety roles have been created in response to initiatives led by Department of Health and Social Care or NHS England and NHS Improvement. The postholder will support an aligned approach to the improvement of safety through these roles and avoid duplication of effort. Depending on the nature of the organisation these include: Medication safety officer (MSO), Medical device safety officer (MDSO), Central Alerting System (CAS) officer, Controlled drugs accountable officer (CDAO), Revalidation Officer (RO), Medical Examiner (ME), Learning from deaths lead, safeguarding leads, Maternity safety champion and GIRFT lead.
The patient safety specialist will lead /support the local implementation of the NHS patient safety strategy which supports the three strategic aims of improving understanding of safety (insight), equipping patients, staff and partners with the skills and opportunities to improve patient safety (involvement) and designing and supporting programmes that deliver effective and sustainable change (improvement).
The patient safety specialist ensures the organisation is up to date with current patient safety policy, NHS contract patient safety requirements, and regulatory patient safety requirements and engages with the
4 regional/national team to understand national guidance and to advise the Board on the best implementation approach. The postholder will work collaboratively with external organisations to develop links and relationships with patient safety and other relevant leads in networks to share good practice and act collaboratively to improve patient safety. They will create networks as required, including across their ICS, if not already in place.

Responsibility for / oversight of the implementation of the NHS patient safety strategy within the organisation

• Provide patient safety expertise/leadership within the organisation; demonstrating compassionate leadership, visibility and supporting the continued development of the patient safety culture
• Oversee and support patient safety improvement, ensuring that systems thinking, human factors understanding and just culture principles are embedded in patient safety processes.
• Ensure the organisation has a robust and effective patient safety strategy in place which aligns with the NHS patient safety strategy.
• Promote patient safety insight as an approach that incorporates understanding all sources of patient safety intelligence, including from incidents, risk assessments, investigations, mortality and morbidity reviews, inquests, research, clinical audits, GIRFT reviews, positive experience, compliments and complaints, litigation, patient and staff surveys, in line with the measurement principles set out in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy.
• Ensure information and intelligence from these sources is used as the basis for prioritising local patient safety development and ensuring proposed improvement approaches are based on an understanding of underlying causes
• Support the effective collation, analysis and presentation of qualitative and quantitative patient safety data and provide regular and tailored reports to all relevant committees, the organisation’s Board and external agencies as required, integrating these data sources to give a comprehensive and patient-centred picture of patients safety challenges, improvement opportunities and achievements
• Communicate patient safety issues, including the definition, framing, escalation and presentation of identified issues, risks and proposed improvement approaches at executive/board level
• Support / lead multi-professional responses to patient safety incidents, tailoring the different approaches required for new or under-recognised issues and wider patient safety challenges needing

5

long-term improvement, ensuring adherence to national policies and enabling timely and good quality reporting

• Support an approach to patient safety that drives improvement across the patient pathway beyond the organisation’s boundaries, including facilitating multi-agency reviews where required.
• Support / lead the implementation of continuous improvement of quality and impact of incident investigations, currently through the new Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
• Ensure mechanisms/policies are in place so that insights lead to actionable recommendations/improvements that can be evidenced, measured and monitored across the organisation from all internal and external organisational reviews, high level enquiries and reports relating to patient safety.
• Make informed decisions based on highly complex and sensitive information available from multiple sources, including patient safety incident data.
• Support (in providers) the Executives’ systems for the response to National Patient Safety Alerts, including systems for Executive identification of clinical leaders for the coordinated cross-organisational delivery of each Alert designated ‘complex’, and robust systems for Executive authorisation of ‘actions completed’.
• Oversee patient safety improvement programmes that support the NHS patient safety strategy

Please refer the Job description for details