Essentials of Safe Care provides an ability for:
- Self-assessment: Teams can review their current safety practices against the driver diagram. This can help identify strengths and areas for improvement.
- Improvement planning: The package can be used to prioritise and design local safety improvement work.
- Education and training: The essentials can be integrated into staff training. This could be staff induction, focused training sessions or ongoing professional development. Teams can access the SPSP learning system. This will help them engage with peer networks to share learning and best practice.
- Measurement and evaluation: Teams can collect and review data. This will help track improvements in safety.
- Consistency across systems: The package can be used to help alignment with national safety priorities. It can also help build standardisation in ways of working.
Four key essentials
The resources within the package are organised under four key essentials:
- A people-led approach to the planning and delivery of safe care
- Effective and inclusive communication
- Leadership at all levels to support a culture of safety
- Safe clinical and care processes
The four essentials are connected to each other. This means that progress in one can influence or rely on another being in place.
For each of the four essentials the following resources are included:
- A descriptor of why each essential is important
- Suggested interventions that will support the essential being achieved
- Change ideas, for practitioners, teams and organisations to adapt and test within their own context
- Tools, resources, evidence and further reading
The Essentials of Safe Care package uses a driver diagram to visually describe how the changes will be achieved. More information on how to use a driver diagram can be found at the NHS Education for Scotland QI Zone.
Readiness for change
An important first step for the organisation and participating teams is to assess readiness to implement changes.
The readiness for change assessment tool aligns to the Scottish Approach to Change. This describes the enabling conditions that need to be in place and steps to follow through a change process.
This tool will support teams and organisations to assess how ready for change they are and where they need to focus to enable that change.
Understanding current practice
Teams should complete the readiness for change assessment tool and develop the associated improvement plan. The next step is to establish how embedded each of the Essentials of Safe Care are within practice.
Each essential can be reviewed to establish to what extent it is embedded. Gaps can then be identified.
The prioritisation matrix can be used to understand how to balance effort and impact within the improvement priorities identified.