The National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes (NatPatSIPs)

The national Patient Safety Improvement Programmes (NatPatSIPs) are a key part of the NHS Patient Safety Strategy, and collectively form the largest safety initiative in the history of the NHS.

The programme’s aim is to promote safer care and reduce error and harm, so the NHS becomes comparable with the safest health care services in the world by 2025. 

The Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) are key delivery partners of the national programmes. PSCs are hosted by Academic Health Science Networks, and have expertise in supporting safer care initiatives, working across organisational boundaries, coaching teams, building capability, measuring change and supporting improvement approaches. 

They do this by working with all health and care settings, such as maternity units, emergency departments, mental health trusts, GP practices and care homes in the following areas: 

• System-level change – work with regional and local health systems to promote systems thinking and collaborate on approaches. 
• Patient Safety Networks – support multi- professional groups across systems to learn from others and deliver the improvement ambitions outlined in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy. 
• Improvement capability – coach teams and leaders and develop their improvement skills, ensuring sustainability. 
• Safety culture – create the right conditions for a culture of safety to flourish across teams. 
• Evidence based interventions – ensure the right safety interventions are thoroughly tested, implemented and spread across the country.

Key enablers for the NatPatSIPs

The delivery of the safety improvement programmes is shaped by the following key enablers: 

• Addressing inequalities: understand local health inequalities to ensure selected interventions improve the lives of those with the worst health outcomes. 
•  Patient and carer co-design: employ a co-production approach with patients, carers and service users who represent the diversity of the population served. 
•  Safety culture: use safety culture insights to inform quality improvement approaches. 
•  Patient safety networks: coordinate and facilitate patient safety networks to provide the sub-regional delivery architecture for improvement. 
•  Clinical leadership: identify and nurture clinical leadership to lead improvement through the networks 
•  Building QI capacity and capability: use the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) dosing approach to build quality improvement capacity and capability. 
•  Measurement: develop a robust measurement plan including relevant process, balancing and outcomes metrics, using the IHI’s Model for Improvement. 
•  Improvement and innovation pipeline: undertake horizon-scanning and prioritisation to inform future national workstreams. 

 National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes (NatPatSIPs) driver diagram