Blog - Thoughts from the Patient First Conference - Kayleigh Price

As the UK's largest patient safety event, the Patient Safety conference brings together patients, families and health and care professionals to share improvements in care. Fresh from the 2017 conference, our Improvement Advisor Kayleigh Price shares some of her highlights from the event.

Kayleigh Price, AQuA Improvement Advisor

Last week I was lucky to attend the annual Patient First conference in London, where alongside my colleagues Andrea McGuinness (@1McGuinness) and Jane Carthey, I was privileged to speak about the Maturity Matrix for the Measurement and Monitoring of Safety.

Our presentation came at the end of an exhilarating and engaging first day to the conference. Whilst there were just so many talks to go into detail on, highlights included a fantastic session by B.Braun Medical on Human Factors, as well as Moving from Safety 1 to Safety 2 from Trevor Date of Atrainability, which discussed how self-awareness and team development can improve the safety of care.

There were also lots of sessions from a number of Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSC’s); with the one from Wessex PSC  around deteriorating patients in non-acute settings, particularly home care environments, standing out in particular.

This posed the question of:

How can we track deterioration effectively in an environment where we are trying to minimise the ‘medicalisation’ of everyday life?

One answer seemed to be soft signals. If a client normally sleeps well but suddenly reports a restless night, this could be considered a flag. It doesn’t mean that they are deteriorating, but that we need to keep an eye on them. The talk was compelling and I can’t wait to get in touch with them directly to find out even more!

Our own talk was the penultimate session of the day in the plenary theatre, which holds up to 500 people (a mildly terrifying prospect!)  By the time we got started it was standing room only!

We were talking about the Safety Measurement and Monitoring Maturity Matrix (SMMMM) a tool designed by Human Factors Consultant Jane Carthey and Nick Downham of WDID, to assist teams with getting started using the Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Framework.

Click here to view an image of the Maturity Matrix

We shared our experience of supporting teams through using the matrix, as well as giving participants a run through of the process of using the tool. I have shared some twitter interactions below:

Day two of the conference was another high energy day packed with sessions. Highlights included a session from Patient Safety Learning's James Titcombe and Jonathan Hazan, about learning from deaths and their new patient safety learning organisation (see @ptsafetylearn for more info).

With the massive number of sessions from PSCs over both days, it was amazing to see the learning coming from these teams. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get around all of the sessions (I’m only one person after all) but I’m really looking forward to working more closely with PSC teams over the next year, as we collaborate nationwide on the Patient Safety Measurement Unit programme.  I’m even more excited for this piece of work now, and I didn’t think that was possible!

Overall the conference was really exciting and I left feeling inspired, engaged and ready to think differently- what more can you really ask for?

Further information on the maturity matrix (and the measurement and monitoring of safety framework) can be found at www.howsafeisourcare.com, or by attending our final sharing session in London on 30 November.

Were you at the conference or want to find out more about the Safety Framework? 

Feel free to share your thoughts with Kayleigh on Twitter via @KayleighPrice14 or Kayleigh.Price@srft.nhs.uk, or via @AQuA_NHS.