Safety at ELFT

The safety of patients, service users, carers and our staff underpins everything we do. We know that people who need care and support need to feel confident that they will get optimum care from us. And trust that all our interventions and processes are safe, and tried and tested.

Key to this is monitoring the outcomes of the care we give - to be sure it is having the right impact. But also exploring and investigating when things don't go so well, understanding why this was, and learning. It is also important that this learning informs all teams in the Trust - not just the team where the incident or issue occurred.

We have a number of ways that we do this and measure the impact of the care we provide. And processes in place for staff to report when some an incident occurs which sets off a train of actions to bring about improvements.

If you have been a patient or service user of ELFT and would like to be involved in work about safety and improvement in the Trust, we'd love to hear from you. See the below information and email us on: elft.safetynetwork@nhs.net

Our Safety Plan mission is to continuously improve safety for people within services, for ALL our people (staff, patients and carers) and work with our local communities to contribute to safer lives for all, at a whole population level.

You can see the first draft of our ELFT Safety Plan here and view these ELFT Safety Plan slides which summarise some of the key points in the plan: ELFT Safety Plan slide presentation.

Later this year, we will transition to the new NHS England framework for learning from incidents: the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) and also a new incident reporting system (LFPSE) in Autumn 2023. Watch this space!

This is a really important part of our work to continuously improve safety. We are developing new roles, new ways to involve patients and carers in our safety improvement work, and better ways we can support people affected when a safety incident occurs. We know service users and carers play a key role in telling us about how safe our services are, so it is important that services have systems in place to enable this dialogue to take place. For example, we have introduced Care Opinion in many of our services and encourage patients, service users and carers to give us feedback on this about how their appointment/treatment has been.