Yorkshire and Humber PSRC

The Yorkshire and Humber Patient Safety Research Collaboration (YH-PSRC) builds on the success of our existing research centre.

This is a collaboration between University of Leeds, one of the most research intensive Universities in the country and Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (BTHFT), a Trust in one of the most deprived areas of the country.

Since being awarded the NIHR PSTRC funding in 2016, we have gone from strength to strength, become a leading national force in co-producing research that makes care safer.

In doing this we have actively developed innovative and inclusive ways of involving patients, the public and local communities and healthcare staff in our research.

Our solution-focused approach and collaborative research ethos has, in turn, attracted leaders in patient safety to join us in this new PSRC as theme leads, co-leads, and members of our advisory board.

Our lay leader membership continues to grow as does our Safety In Numbers Group (SING), supporting us to deliver research that responds to patient experience and needs. We will now establish a programme of community research to understand and tackle Safety Inequity.

As a group we will continue to learn from our patient and family collaborators and develop our skills in patient engagement within the research team. We will share this learning with others.

Our vision for the new NIHR YH-PSRC is to co-produce, implement and evaluate innovative solutions to make care safer for patients and their families.

These will be grounded in an understanding of the realities of health and social care systems, particularly in this Covid-19 recovery period. We understand that healthcare is delivered and experienced by patients across a complex health and social care system.

Acknowledging and embracing this complexity is essential if we are to deliver effective solutions to patient safety problems.

Our themes of work address four of the strategic patient safety challenges specified in this call and align with the research needs identified by NHS England and NHS Improvement.

Each theme addresses a piece of the jigsaw of optimising safety in complex systems: the importance for safety of just and learning cultures the need to know how safe services are now, and in the future, not just how safe they were in the past the value of evidence about what are effective safety practices (and what are not) the key role that patients/families play in managing safety at home.

We will deliver a programme of research in each of these four areas.

We will develop solutions and ideas (with patients and staff) that will make care safer by supporting patients/families, changing practice, informing policy makers and regulators and guiding leaders. Further to this we will generate evidence about disparities in safety to help tackle safety inequity.

We will use the funding wisely to collaborate with a range of partners (local, national and international), develop our research team and grow income so that we can respond rapidly to patient safety challenges now and in the future. In the process, we will advance safety science.