RLDatix Patient Safety Conference 2018

On the 13th November we held the bi-annual RLDatix Patient Safety Conference at the iconic Royal College of Physicians. The theme of the conference was ‘Data into actions and insights', with representatives from across the UK and beyond gathered to collaborate and improve healthcare lessons, with speakers focusing on the enormous scope for learning when things go wrong and the power of data.

The day took delegates through a journey of the RLDatix Quality Improvement Loop on which the new system, DatixCloudIQ is built, with presentations demonstrating how to bridge the gap between siloed processes and turn data into actionable intelligence and insight. The day offered delegates multiple ways to get involved including posters, an opinion poll, feedback cards and social media. Members of RLDatix staff from across all the various teams were in attendance and on hand to assist delegates with any queries, including surgeries that provided information on training and consultancy, general support and how to integrate with other software used by organisations.

Speakers

Invited to speak at this year’s conference were a mixture of speakers from a combination of acute NHS Trusts, mental health Trusts and health boards’ in Wales. Each speaker shared with the audience examples of best practice, success stories and how data has been used to improve patient safety and quality within their organisations. The keynote speaker was from the fourth largest life sciences employer in the UK, IQVIA. Tim Sheppard, General Manager at IQVIA showed the audience the successes they have had working in partnership with health organisations across the world, moving from data to action by using statistics to build evidence and reduce variation in the same treatment pathways between providers. This work is paving the way for predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to uncover new insights from the data RLDatix customers capture on a daily basis. IQVIA shared that they have been able to improve precision of identifying lung cancer patients more likely to transition to 2nd line therapy from 41% to 79%.

A presentation from Caroline Waterworth, Head of Safety at Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust, covered the pros and cons of having central investigation teams and detailed what makes a successful investigation. Following on from this, Stephanie Muir, Head of Quality & Governance and Sian Hopkins, Quality Improvement Lead at Hywel Dda University Health Board, presented on ‘effecting change following patient safety incidents’. They spoke about how feedback holds equal importance to campaigns for new organisational values, learning and culture across their entire organisation.

In addition, there was a panel session with NHS Improvement and two NHS Trusts who have converted recommendations from investigations into improvement strategies and how they achieved this. During the session we heard how Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust has changed the way they use restraint, and the starting point of this was reflecting on what data they captured on restraint and whether it was enough to support measuring improvements after they have made the change.

In the afternoon session delegates saw a talk given by Mark Rose, Deputy Director of Patient Safety at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn Trust, who showed how using micro coding in radiology is used to capture better data of the events at various stages in a pathway. This process means the organisation can see exactly which parts of the pathway are affected by incidents. In turn he has given his organisation the data needed to focus on specific points of the pathway for quality improvements. Mark spoke about how it is equally as important to learn how deviation can have positive outcomes and how we need to capture and learn from these ‘positive surprises’.

The final speaker from NHS Wales Shared Services Partnerships shared with the audience their vision, which they are putting into practice, to create the first ever shared services mortality platform, being developed in partnership with RLDatix for the various NHS Welsh Boards. The vision of the Welsh partnership is to have a single dataset from which to code and categorise complaints, claims and incidents to offer consistency and encourage local initiatives and scrutiny.

You can view videos of the presentations here.

Patient Safety Posters

We invited delegates to submit posters for display at the conference, which showcased some of the great work our customers are doing. Entries ranged from ‘The Evolution of the Datix Huddle’ from Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust, ‘Datix as a clinical tool to analyse behaviours of concern’ from The Huntercombe Group and the innovative NHS Wales Shared Partnerships road map highlighting how they are going to achieve the first ever national mortality platform.

We asked delegates to vote for their favourite poster throughout the day and the winning poster was:

‘Promoting patient safety: a picture paints a million words’ 
Hywel Dda University Health Board

As the winning organisation, Hywel Dda are going to have a short film produced around the work they showcased in their poster.

You can view all the posters here.

Twitter #Datix18
Throughout the day delegates made good use of social media to ask some great questions to the chair and our speakers.

@teepip73
 #Datix18 with the variability in quality and content of investigation reports, is there any possibility of having an NHS training program/qualification to improve consistency? And standard reporting templates?

@FionaJayn
 #Datix18 Caroline, A very informative presentation, thank you.  With a central team of investigators how do you involve staff in training and succession for investigation and investigation skills?

@Jat_man
 Hi #Datix18.  We have a lot of no harm/ near miss incidents reported that do not get a full RCA.  How do we get the necessary learning from these to prevent future serious incidents.

Networking throughout the day also allowed attendees to talk to their peers and find out how they use RLDatix to enhance patient safety in their areas of work. Key questions asked throughout the day included whether investigations should focus on proactive strategies to stop incidents from happening in the first place and how organisations conduct investigations, locally or centrally?

NRLS

During the break, Marcos Manhaes, Head of National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) held a talk on The NRLS: 15th anniversary and the future. In a full room of delegates, he talked about how over 15 years’ incident reporting has increased from 200,000 to over 2 million reports per year, a sure sign of the supported improvements in the culture of openness and learning from incidents to improve patient care. He went on to update the room on the new Patient Safety Incident Management System that will replace the NRLS and STEIS.

Power of Data

The theme throughout the day was that without the initiative taken by all those presenting to think smarter about how and what they capture data for, innovation to improve healthcare across the board would be much lower. Building on so many positive examples, we here at RLDatix are looking to the next level of transforming data to improve safety by analysing the connection between incident data and medications, in order to share themes of where errors occur with our customers. 

Winding down the end of the conference, delegates were given demonstrations of the DatixCloudIQ software. During these demonstrations staff were on hand to answer any questions the attendees had about the modules.


Thank you to everyone who participated in this year’s conference, including the speakers and those who travelled to be with us, in order to have the most important conversations about what makes things safer for everyone in healthcare. 

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