Healthcare Providers are "High Reliability Organisations", which means that they routinely deal with high levels of risk and complexity. But it also means that even minor errors could have catastrophic consequences. What happens then, when serious errors are repeated and compounded by inadequate incident reporting?

UK vaccination efforts have achieved a great deal of success and the rates of infection and death from Covid have dropped significantly, but the current waiting list for treatments is higher than it’s ever been since records began. That means Trusts will need the right tools to beat the backlog while still delivering excellent quality assurance...

The CQC's latest COVID-19 Insight report addresses the important issue of closed cultures and how they create significant risks for safe and effective patient care. After the issues that were revealed at Whorlton Hall, Winterbourne View, Mid Staffordshire Hospital and other services, the CQC’s investigations highlighted serious failings that resulted from closed cultures, and the impact that these had on people using services.

It’s common knowledge that COVID-19 had a huge and unprecedented impact on healthcare, and quantifying that impact fell to the CQC. That’s why earlier this year, they issued a report on how urgent and emergency care services were affected by the pandemic during winter 2020 and discussed the actions they took to provide constructive support.

Since they first began in 2018, the HSJ Patient Safety Awards have been dedicated to recognising safety, culture, and experience in patient care. They’re designed to celebrate the teams at the frontline that improve standards of patient safety and drive cultural change to minimise risk, enhance quality of care and ultimately save lives.

NHS Improvement recently announced that that ambulance crews across England have been issued with tens of thousands of iPads in a bid to speed up patient care.

Change happens fast and so do risks, so how certain are you that your Trust’s BAF is actually up to the job?

The world has changed, and keeps changing. NHS and healthcare providers are continuously expected to deliver more for their money, even under unprecedented circumstances and in the midst of challenges that few could have foreseen.

Last week, the CQC issued a press release announcing that a Nottinghamshire care home had been fined over £150,000 for failing to protect its residents from avoidable harm, after a resident with a history of problematic and aggressive behaviour caused another resident to fall and sustain a head injury.