...Nearly 1 million patients fall victim to poor health & safety practices...

Monday 29th June 2009, ikonami, a provider of bespoke learning software systems for Government, Independent Healthcare and National Health Service (NHS) organisations, today called for healthcare organisations to increase the strategic use of Human Resource (HR) information to increase competence, improve health and safety (H&S) and reduce risk.  An astonishing one million people fall victim to poor standards of care through patient accidents or problems with treatments, procedures or medication – one third of whom suffer low to moderate harm, and even extended illness or fatality.

According to the NHS National Patient Safety Agency’s (NPSA) National Reporting and Learning Service*, 846,909 adverse patient safety incidents were recorded in NHS England from 1st October 2007 to 30th September 2008 and 53,945 incidents in NHS Wales during the same period.  The number of incidents reported in NHS England from 1st October to 31st December 2008 was 268,997 – the highest number of reports in a single quarter in the history of the reporting scheme.  In Scotland, it has been reported that 64,537 adverse incidents were recorded by health boards during 2008. 

The NHS has a number of reporting schemes that assess risk and measure adverse incidents in NHS organisations.  For example, the NHS Litigation Authority’s (NHSLA) risk management standards are used to evaluate an organisation’s progress towards minimising organisational, clinical, and H&S risks.  These schemes have led to greater transparency and accountability, but incident numbers have continued to rise. 

Kubair Shirazee, Co-founder and Director of ikonami comments: "Healthcare organisations have the regulatory framework to help identify and measure risk.  They also have the Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) that identifies the skills needed by NHS employees.  Learning management tools are also available to help administer and track training activity, to ensure employees receive the correct training.  If incidents continue to increase in spite of the right structures and procedures being in place to ensure a competent, safe workforce, we need to consider whether the relevant data is being used strategically to improve performance.” 

ikonami argues that HR and training data can be used to bridge the gap.  Learning management systems with negative reporting functionality can be used to identify individual employees who have not completed training in specific areas to comply with key standards.  Regular and accurate reporting can highlight the departments that need to conduct additional training in health and safety procedures, systems usage or clinical skills to bridge these gaps.   Training data can also be used to design timely communications programmes that reinforce core skills and procedures, and to determine intervals for refresher training, leading to a safer, more competent workforce.  However, this requires an information system that makes it easy to generate on demand, accurate, up to date reports on any aspect of training provision.  

During 2008, ikonami’s AT-Learning™ Learning Management System (LMS) was used by healthcare organisations across the UK to make 587,105 training course bookings, 70% of which were for mandatory or statutory courses such as health and safety training.  Clients can produce positive or negative reports on any data field, on an automated or ad hoc basis.  This enables Chief Executives and Risk Managers to better understand the potential level of risk created by their workforce and also helps HR staff to prioritise training that mitigates that risk.  By enabling its healthcare clients to improve staff competence and reduce risk, ikonami touches upon (insert number) patient lives. 

Shirazee concludes: “The NPSA states that high and consistent reporting organisations tend to have stronger safety cultures.  We contend that also holds true where senior executives frequently use in-depth reports on different aspects of training and employee competence to proactively manage risk.  Healthcare managers can and should be using training information to close gaps in clinical, management, systems and health and safety skills, in order to improve patient outcomes.”