Meet our patient safety specialists
Patient safety manager Helen Roberts and consultant psychiatrist Dr Kiran Rele are the Trust’s dedicated patient safety specialists. They have taken on this role alongside their current roles, providing senior leadership, visibility, and expert support to the patient safety work in our Trust.
Their role supports the development of a patient safety culture, ensuring that the patient is at the centre of all patient safety activity. Helen and Kiran will ensure the organisation is up to date with current patient safety policy, and work with other Trusts to share good practice.
The patient safety specialists’ work is supported by the NHS Patient Safety Strategy which aims to:
- improve understanding of safety
- equip patients, staff and partners with the skills and opportunities to improve patient safety
- design and support programmes that deliver effective and sustainable change
Kiran said: “I am delighted to be a part of the team in my role as associate medical director for patient safety. Patient safety is fundamental to delivering high quality essential health services. It aims to prevent and reduce risks, errors and harm that occur to patients (and staff) during provision of health care. A cornerstone of the discipline is continuous improvement based on shared learning from errors and adverse events and nurturing a just culture.”
Helen added: “I am excited to be identified as a patient safety specialist, which builds on my role of patient safety manager over the last six years. I feel it will further strengthen our systems and process to support patient safety across the Trust. This is the first time we have had a national Patient Safety Strategy and it will help us to drive patient safety improvements forward across the NHS as a whole. It complements our existing strategy and we have a good foundation for our future direction.
“Although this role is to lead and support implementation in the Trust of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy at a local level, patient safety remains everyone’s responsibility and our role will support staff to do this. There are lots of exciting developments including, training in patient safety at a range of levels from e-learning for all, to in depth specialist training; developing our culture, a new framework for responding to patient safety incidents next year and a new learning from patient safety events system to name but a few. We will be sharing more information as each area progresses.”
Darryl Thompson, director of nursing, quality and professionals, is committed to supporting this role, saying: “It is essential that we learn from any patient safety incidents and that we do everything we can to prevent harm in the future. This role will ensure we are approaching this learning in the most effective way, and I am very pleased that we have the combined talents of Kiran and Helen to lead our Trust in this process”.
