Midlands Patient Safety Research Collaborative

Our aim Patient safety incidents happen when something goes wrong in the way care is delivered. Sometimes these errors result from a lack of knowledge or skill.

But research shows that most result from human error – a clinician makes a mistake (e.g. prescribing error) or misses something (e.g. diagnostic error).

Our Patient Safety Research Collaboration (PSRC) aims to make care safer for patients by finding ways to trap errors in our two clinical Themes, which address high risk, potentially error prone areas of medicine. What will the PSRC do?

Theme 1: Acute Care In Acute Care errors are especially common because it is a fast-paced clinical setting where some of the most unwell patients are treated, and treatment is shared among many clinicians creating numerous opportunities for error. In this theme, we will focus on how we can use patient electronic records to improve safety.

For example, by alerting clinicians when results of a patient s blood test shows their dose of a medicine needs to change.

Theme 2: Maternity Care Maternity care is a National Patient Safety priority, where risk is often missed and where we have found that service users are provided with inconsistent information.

Our maternity services cater for a high proportion of people from ethnic minorities who have worse outcomes, worse care and less comprehensive counselling than others.

Therefore, we will focus on addressing a clinician s failure to recognise risks and improving communication and understanding of risks for women and their babies.

Core activity We aim to build capacity in safety research by working with our medical and nursing schools, and with other funders, as well as affiliated industry and NHS partners.

Working with communities Patients and communities will be at the heart of our research, working together with researchers, managers and clinicians to co-design and evaluate systems to improve patient safety across all themes.

We will work in close partnership with underserved communities to identify and better understand health inequalities, ensuring that we carry out relevant research for the benefit of all patients.