Patient safety charity launches digital ideas hub

A new online hub has been launched as a tool to share and develop ideas around patient safety.

Patient Safety Learning (PSL) committed to launching The Hub in its Blueprint for Action, published last month.

Currently in beta phase, PSL is seeking feedback from users before the hub is officially launched at the Patient Safety Learning Conference on 2 October.

The charity vowed to make data and insight for patient safety a core action of its blueprint, including convening a panel of experts to identify critical data and insight needed to measure and monitor safety.

It called for patient safety to be designed into digital initiatives as a core principle, rather than it being an “add-on”.

The Hub will be the “engine” of Patient Safety Learning and provide a space for sharing local, national, and one day international knowledge around patient safety.

It will also be a place of discussion in order to develop ideas and improve techniques, whether that be around clinical pathways, telehealth, apps for health and care, data sharing or other patient safety issues.

“Rather than presenting a report that says ‘here’s another thing you should do’, we thought we would develop something to help people do it,” Helen Hughes, chief executive of Patient Safety Learning, told Digital Health.

“We developed our thinking [for The Hub] based on experts in patient safety and knowledge-sharing more broadly.

“We’ve designed it on the basis of what we believe will be helpful and then we’ve invited users who have come in [to give their opinion]”

Clive Flashman, chief digital officer at the charity, added: “We went to people and asked, what are the problems? What are the gaps in what you would want to do, where you do your job every day are you not able to find information and access stuff?

“We used design thinking to identify what the problems were – and there were a lot of problems around sharing knowledge and information. Then we addressed that to work out how we solve it.”

The charity will provide some content for the hub, but hopes most content will be driven by users.

It’s free to sign up and is open to anyone who wants to learn more, and make a difference to, patient safety, including patients themselves.

The charity has previously called for consistent regulatory standards to be applied to medical apps.

Speaking at a Royal College of Medicines event on medical apps on 4 April, Hughes said the standards were a “necessity” to protect patient safety.

There are currently “more questions than answers” surrounding the safety of medical apps and in order to improve their safety, three prerequisites are essential, Hughes said.

They are: a digital hub with a dedicated learning platform for patient safety; better data and insight to measure and improve safety performance; and a partnership with patients to inform the development of apps.

To sign up to The Hub visit www.pslhub.org.