Patient Safety
Theme Leader
Safety in health care is now at the centre of the national, and international, policy agenda. Health care is complex and is often high risk with the chance of an unintended consequence. However it is possible, as other industries and sectors have shown, to reduce the frequency and severity of incidents. The complexities involved in understanding how to deliver safe care to patients requires involvement of many disciplines, approaches and methodologies. System failings are at the heart of when things go wrong, and are the focus of most of the patient safety research undertaken in the Section, although there is an increasing interest in the role that staff and patients play in improving the resilience of symptoms. Areas of research interest in the Section include:
- the identification and reporting of incidents
- understanding how and why incidents occur
- learning from incidents and developing policies and practices to stop them occurring in future
- organisational safety culture
- learning from the experiences of health care systems, other sectors and industries across the world
Completed Research Projects
Records Review for Safety and Quality (RReSQ)
June 2004-November 2007
Principal Investigator: Professor Allen Hutchinson
Incident Reporting to the National Patient Safety Agency: Relationship to Safety and Quality Data
January-December 2006
Principal Investigator: Professor Allen Hutchinson
Medication Hazard Analysis
Principal Investigator: Dr Jon Karnon
Evaluation of a Patient Safety Climate Questionnaire
May 2004-May 2006
Principal Investigator: Professor Allen Hutchinson
Quality and Safety in COPD Care Pathways
July 2003-August 2004
Principal Investigator: Professor Allen Hutchinson