4/5/2007

Your Letters

Hospital is actually one of the safest in the country

Anyone reading the article in the Mail on April 17, headlined ‘One third of staff have seen threat to patient care’, might have been left with the impression that Frimley Park Hospital is not a safe place to receive treatment. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The article was based upon the annual staff survey carried out independently at some 150 hospitals across England and Wales covering many aspects of the workplace.

On the question of the number of staff witnessing an error, near miss or incident which could have hurt patients or staff, Frimley Park actually had one of the lowest percentage scores in the country (your readers would not have discovered this until the third column).

The number of such incidents in all hospitals sounds very high, but perhaps this is not surprising when one considers that hospitals are increasingly run on risk management principles, with staff actively trained and encouraged to be alert to all potential dangers — particularly to patients.

That is why I was very pleased that Frimley Park had the best score in the country out of all 150 hospitals on the staff’s perception of the effectiveness of procedures for reporting those errors, near misses and incidents. It shows there is a robust policy in this organisation for addressing any issues that might affect patient safety and that staff have confidence in it.

This was reflected in our recent Level 3 accreditation for staff and patient safety by the NHS Litigation Authority (which insures trusts against potential legal action for negligence). Frimley Park is the only hospital in the UK to have attained this top level safety accreditation.

Frimley Park also scored the best marks in the country in four other key areas: quality of work-life balance; the extent of positive feeling within the organisation; desire of staff to stay in their jobs; and effective action towards violence and harassment.

As director of human resources, I was delighted that staff hold such positive feelings towards their place of work. Hospital care is changing rapidly, especially in Surrey, so I hope the public are as reassured as I was by the survey results that staff here are in a strong position to meet the challenges.

Janet King
Personnel and facilities director
Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

First printed in: Aldershot News and Mail