I’m Phil and I work in the Central Quality, Safety & Governance team as Patient Safety Lead. I’ve been with IC24 for six years. Prior to this, I worked for 12 years as a GP Practice Manager. In addition to oversight of incident reporting, I also manage our patient engagement activity along with my colleague, Helen Knope.

A good deal of my role involves identifying what we can learn from incidents, including those that require deeper investigation under the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). Last year I completed the Patient Safety Specialist course at Loughborough University, an NHSE requirement for all providers seeking to deliver patient safety improvements under PSIRF. Much of my work now involves supporting colleagues who carry out incident investigations, sharing with them ideas on how to use some of the investigation methods recommended under the new Framework. In September I ran our first PSIRF Workshop where we tackled some of the challenges involved in understanding how to apply these tools to our services, in particular telephone triage. The next workshop will look more closely at Primary Care and environments where the patient is present, such as home visiting.

Patient engagement is a big part of PSIRF, where patients and families have the opportunity to shape the scope of investigations. It is also important to ensure that the patient voice is heard in other ways. While patient questionnaires are helpful in providing an overview of how satisfied patients are with our services, we also gather feedback by visiting patient groups at GP practices to hear first-hand their experience of using 111 and out-of-hours services. We produced a video, “How does NHS111 work?”, in response to feedback from these visits where there was uncertainty about the role of Health Advisers and the way in which an NHS 111 Pathway assessment is managed.

There is good engagement with reporting incidents on Ulysses across IC24, but a particular challenge of my role is to help colleagues feel that improvements in patient safety are being made and that we have a safety culture that is open to everyone being able to raise concerns and ideas without fear of criticism.