Is technology the key to better patient safety?
Health Secretary Matt Hancock has announced a national strategy for patient safety will be drawn up in parallel with the long-term plan being created for the NHS.
The national director for patient safety Dr Aidan Fowler will develop the strategy.
The Health Service Journal (HSJ) says Mr Hancock’s announcement comes shortly after the Labour Party said it would amend the government’s proposed Healthcare Safety Bill to include safe staffing rules and independence for medical examiners.
Mr Hancock was speaking at the launch of the organisation Patient Safety Learning. He stressed his belief that technology and open data was the key to improving safety and care and said he wanted transparent open data to help spot systemic failures.
He said: ‘We’re moving towards full roll-out of electronic prescribing and medicines administration in secondary care to extend inter-operability and reduce medication-related error.
‘Our new patient safety incident management system will improve how we capture and spread the insight that we can gain from incident reporting in the NHS.’