Debbie Clark and colleagues representing the Improvement Academy travel to Birmingham to host the Measurement and Monitoring of Safety event.
The setting for today’s Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Framework (MMSF) event was in the heart of Birmingham city centre. The team had to resist the urge to hit the shops and focus on the job in hand; sharing their learning and experience of using the MMSF across a range of health and social care organisations.
The event in Birmingham stemmed from a conversation with the head of the safety at Birmingham Community Trust who made contact with the MMSF programme team to find out more about the work they had been doing. In this discussion the appetite for taking a proactive approach to safety was clear and the team from Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy arranged to host an event in Birmingham to allow as many staff as possible from Birmingham Community Trust to attend as well as opening the invite to anyone else in the country who might be interested!
Jackie Hallam and Kayleigh Price kicked the event off with an informative breakfast session to make sure all attendees knew something about the MMSF and how it had been tested by four regional improvement bodies.
The main event then got off to a flying start with Professor Rebecca Lawton introducing delegates to the reasons why we might need to use a different approach to safety which is holistic, proactive and about more than swatting mosquitoes!
Professor Mohammed Mohammed built upon this, sharing thoughts on how organisations can work with the MMSF but specifically focussing on how Safety Huddles provide a great vehicle for starting this work based on experiences in Yorkshire and the Humber.
Following the morning sessions Thabani Songo, Clinical Services Manager from Bradford District Care Trust spoke about his team’s experience of using the MMSF in Mental Health setting and how it has changed the way the ward now works.
Next up, a market place event with stalls manned by teams involved with testing the implementation of the MMSF. Delegates could choose to visit as many stalls as they liked during the market place session to find out more the framework and how it has been used in different areas. In the Yorkshire and Humber region we took a frontline approach to testing and implementing the framework.
The other improvement bodies involved in the MMSF program of work also shared their learning with AQuA discussing taking a whole health economy approach, HIS focusing on creating a common language around safety and sharing from Ward to Board and Haelo discussing their safer Salford programme, concerned with Safer Leadership (how do you engage non-execs with the MMSF?) and Safer Intelligence (how on earth do you build a measurement system that can be used with the framework?!)
The rest of the day was interesting and clearly an extremely useful forum for people who are new to the framework. Following time to plan how they might use the MMSF in their local setting, a panel discussion with Prof Rebecca Lawton, Prof Mohammed Mohammed, Dr Robin Jeffrey and Thabnai Songo provided an opportunity to pick the brains of people who had considerable experience in trying to use the MMSF in practice as well as experts in the field of patient safety and improvement science.
The Improvement Academy team and colleagues from HIS, AQuA and Haelo, sadly had to leave Birmingham soon after the event ……but they are keeping in touch with delegates on a WebEx on the 1st November and hope to hear about their plans for using the framework.
