Ben Thomas
London South Bank University, UK
Title: Towards safer psychiatric and mental health services
Biography
Biography: Ben Thomas
Abstract
In England, UK acute mental health services are under pressure due to rising demand, over 2,500,000 contacts with mental health services per year. There are more people with complex mental health care needs, increased detentions under the Mental Health Act,1983, and a decline in the mental health registered nursing workforce. All of these factors results in more opportunities for things to go wrong and mistakes to occur. Mental health service users, especially when acutely unwell, are vulnerable to a number of potential risks, sometimes related to their own behaviour such as self-harm, or to the behaviour of other service users such as aggression and violence. Other risks relate to safety risks from their care or treatment, such as medication errors and treatment errors. This makes mental health service users a particularly vulnerable group of patients.
Nationally improving patient safety is a function of an organisation called NHS Improvement. Reports of patient safety incidents and their root causes are collected through the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS). A patient safety incident is defined as ‘any unitended or unexpected incident that could have or did lead to harm for one or more patients receiving NHS-funded care.’ Every mental health service caring for NHS patients reports incidents to the NRLS. The reported incidents are analysed by a clinical team to learn from them and to develop solutions to improve safety. Incident reporting enables the types and causes of safety problems to be identified and supportsb efforts to prevent harm to patients. Self-harming behaviour remains the highest number of incidents reported by mental health services. A number of successful solutions have been introduced, for example, the introduction of collapsible curtain rails and the removal of ligature points which has drastically reduced the number of service users who succeed in hanging themselves on wards. However, the methods service users employ to self harm is constantly changing and new solutions, recommendations and guidance continue to be developed.