Healthcare professionals help and support service users every day. Sometimes things go wrong despite our best efforts. When this happens, we need to learn from it to make services safer. We are also interested in hearing about positive events too.
The QPS Incident Management Team is leading in the Patient Safety Stories project. Through this project we want to develop stories from service users and staff from different settings. These stories help to build our knowledge about patient safety. Feel free to use them when training staff in your areas.
We would love to show-case examples of services who identify risk and taking action. We'd also like to hear about patient safety initiatives that involved service users.
We would like to hear from you if you have a story about patient safety. Please contact us at patientsafetytogether@hse.ie A member of our team will contact you to talk about your story and how we can develop it.
In the aftermath of a patient safety incident staff often experience intense emotions and vulnerability. They may have strong feelings of guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, humiliation, isolation, depression, and loss of confidence.
Incidents can have a devastating impact on service users and families and cause harm in two ways; first from the incident itself and second from the way it is handled by the service. It is therefore essential that services learn from the experience of patients so that they can improve their response to service users and families in the aftermath of an incident.
