Dear Membership,
Volunteers required – all levels of experience welcome!
At the Excellent November meeting the Friday afternoon was set aside for discussion of patient safely.
This is an area that all surgeons should be aware of and actively support. In the session, Kirsty Ellis presented some data from the national group that is encouraging safety and applying the principals to the paediatric population. Many improvements have already been introduced across Scotland and we are, I believe, unique in having a national group overseeing these developments. Her presentation was followed by Sr Thomson, Glasgow where she presented the pathway and development of the ‘Sign out’ which has been introduced recently in Glasgow. She outlined the hurdles and impediments that she had to overcome and was able to demonstrate that with work and ‘buy in’ there are measurable benefits (e.g. significant impotents in the accuracy of coding).
Following this Prof Youngson opened to the floor and identified the area where the SSPS membership have a role in moving forward these patient safety programmes. In adult practice surgical site infection is used as a crude proxy to try and demonstrate progress. At SSPS we have previously had presentation showing how difficult this data is to verify and apply even in the adult practice. In paediatric practice we think (although it is difficult to confirm) that the level of SSI is too small to be a useful measure. What is required is a proxy or surrogate measure that can be used to try and demonstrate the impact of the patient safety changes.
To that end I am looking for volunteers to form a small group to try and come up with definable measures that can be monitored to assess the results or outcomes of the perioperative care bundles. This is no easy task but if introduced in a national and coordinated manor may give us a unique look at the changes in patient safety that simple systematic procedures can introduce.
If you are interested in contributing to this vital area, please reply to this email with your details and I will try and arrange a meeting or other way of communication to try and identify a way forward.
email (secretary@ssps-info.org.uk) or the contact page.