Patient involvement
We believe that getting patients involved is critical to safety and quality improvement. To support patient involvement in our work, CPSSQ has two patient representatives. There are three key areas where we think patients' input is crucial:
Promoting quality and safety in your own care
Patients are at the centre of their care experience and should feel able - if they wish - to participate actively in ensuring that their care is safe. Little things like reminding your doctor or nurse to wash their hands before they treat you, keeping an eye on your wound healing and alerting a member of staff if things don't seem right, or being aware of any potential side effects of your medication and alerting someone if you experience anything unexpected, can all make a difference. Of course, patients are not responsible for ensuring the quality and safety of their care - but they can help it along!
Dr Rachel Davis is our resident patient involvement research expert, and has looked at the things which hospital inpatients are able and willing to do to support the quality and safety of their care. Rachel is now looking at patient involvement in blood transfusion safety - an exciting new research direction for CPSSQ. In other patient-related projects, Anna Pinto is leading our research on how patients feel when they experience an error in their care, and Dr Stephanie Russ is investigating patients' views on the World Health Organisation Surgical Safety Checklist.
Helping to define our quality and safety research agenda
Our research is inspired and guided by many factors, including problems flagged up by routine monitoring data, interesting findings from other research and issues experienced by our clinical colleagues in their own practice. Patients too can provide us with brilliant ideas for research, and we would be delighted to hear suggestions from individual patients and patient groups.
It is also important to us to have patient input on our new and existing projects, in terms of how patients will be involved in the project, how outputs from the project will be communicated back to patients and how project results might have a real impact on patients' care. Ensuring that research has clear patient benefit is central to our vision. We are currently recruiting a Management Patient Representative who will be responsible for ensuring that we have adequate input from patients in all the work we do.
Participating in our quality and safety research
We have a whole research theme dedicated to the patient perspective on quality and safety in healthcare, and we are often seeking patients to participate in research conducted within that theme.
Participating in our research usually just involves being interviewed by one of our researchers, or completing a questionnaire.
All of our research projects are carefully reviewed by an independent Ethics Committee to ensure that they are properly designed, safe for participants to join, and that any data we obtain from our participants remain confidential.
We recruit participants through a number of sources including this website, so watch this space! If you are interested in taking part in a research project or knowing more about our patient involvement projects then please contact Anna Pinto (a.pinto@imperial.ac.uk).
