Safety and learning reports: an invaluable resource for healthcare staff

One of the great difficulties in patient safety and health quality is keeping up to date with all the material produced nationally and internationally. This problem is becoming increasingly apparent as patient safety takes more of a centre-stage role globally, becoming recognised as a growing world problem. There are a myriad patient safety and health sources that produce useful reports, guides and tools. This information needs identifying, capturing, assessing and cascading down to busy nurses, doctors and other staff.

I have frequently mentioned this difficulty in my columns and that there is no easy solution. Busy health professionals in resource-constrained environments need easily accessible, well-written, comprehensive and authoritative patient safety information sources in a ‘one-stop’ shop, which is a challenge in the NHS. There is a need for a comprehensive global patient safety information hub.

The NHS has a range of patient safety and health quality information sources; healthcare staff have their favourites but they cannot be expected keep up to date with all of them. They need to work out which sources to prioritise and how to update themselves regularly on patient safety.