Patient safety in the NHS: after Francis

As the adage goes, to know where you are going, you need to know where you have been. This is true of any professional endeavour. A period of appraisal and reflection is periodically needed on past efforts and events to assess progress. A reset, or recalibration, may be called for, either because there has been failure or, conversely, because everything is tracking towards expectations.

The key point in developing any policy is to be forward thinking and not to be rooted in the past. I have said this in previous columns, and it is worth repeating again, because it is particularly relevant to the efforts of the NHS in developing a patient safety culture: too much of a backward-looking perspective can hamper the development of a safety culture, and there are concerns that such a focus is hampering the NHS to deal with patient safety issues. Such sentiments were recently expressed by the patient safety commissioner, Dr Henrietta Hughes. In her First 100 Days Report, she stated: