Proximie: Patient safety in surgery – the urgent need for reform

This report considers the number of safety incidents in surgery occurring in the NHS since 2015 and calls for action to improve surgical safety. It also highlights the perceptions of patients from a survey of people who have had surgery in the last five years. It is authored by surgical care platform Proximie, with support from experts in the surgical space.

Comments by Dr S Chockalingam

This article is by Proximie, an independent organization with paid employees and funding from investors and grants. This article is a blog from its website and is not peer-reviewed.

This article has two aspects. The data from NHS on the safety incidents is considered and calls for urgent action in NHS organization in UK. It highlights the never events which has not dropped in number since 2015 and increase in safety incidents in this organization. The second part of the article is patient perception of safety of patients in this organization. It mentions that over three quarters of sampled patients who had surgery had safety concerns about their surgery.

Based on these data, the article recommends seven key aspects to the NHS to improve patient safety.

These are

  1. Statutory Policies for surgical teams to follow
  2. Standard data from operating theatres to improve understanding
  3. Learning platforms for surgical teams
  4. Learning when things go well as well as they don’t
  5. Patient engagement
  6. Empowering health care professionals
  7. Increase funding for innovation, technology for the surgical teams to improve themselves and share their expertise

It is important for organisations and surgical teams to learn from this large health care organization, “The NHS”, National health Service.The NHS provides health care with multiple layers of health care professionals at multiple levels of community and primary, secondary and tertiary hospital care settings. It is hence difficult to extrapolate the conclusions from this article to all health care organizations.

Proximie, the independent organization has tried to highlight this issue of patient safety. However, it should be noted that this report is independent document from this body, not peer reviewed and not provide a scientific analysis of various incidents and their root cause. Patient perception is a separate topic by itself and the document has not done justice to the first part by bringing in the second part of patient perception.

However, the article brings back the patient safety to the centre of health care providers which have different structures, funding and guidelines for themselves.

The article does justice by bringing back the accountability of health care providers to the patients whom they serve.

chockalingam

Dr S. Chockalingam

Senior Consultant – Orthopaedic Surgeon`

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