Work procedures (e.g. policies, guidelines, protocols, checklists) are designed to apply to most situations. When you often need to deviate from work procedures, it can be a sign that things are ‘drifting into danger’.
| M1-a
Do you often have to deviate from work procedures? If so, why? |
M1-b
How do you ensure the design and implementation of work procedures support safe work? |
Safety is the first priority in health and social care, and this is reflected in decisions by frontline clinical and support staff, management and other specialist and technical staff, however, it is not the only requirement.
| M2-a
How do you balance safety against other requirements of your job (e.g. being efficient or striving to be person-centred)? |
M2-b
How can we get the balance right? |
Hazards are anything that can potentially cause harm to you, staff, patients, service users, clients, visitors, other people or the organisation. Risk is a judgement on how likely the hazard is to actually cause harm. We need to be aware of the risks that are relevant to our work so that we prioritise and manage them to be as-low-as-reasonably-practicable, or ALARP.
| M3-a
How are you aware of the hazards in your work? |
M3-b
Are you aware of the risks of these causing harm and how to minimise these? If so, how effective is this? |
Risks often need to be taken, e.g. where there is missing information, demand is greater than capacity or there are competing work priorities. It is hard to assess the level of risk in our activities. We need to be mindful when risky decisions, which initially make us feel uncomfortable, become normalised and drift into unsafe practise.
Sometimes problems seem so long-standing or difficult to resolve that they are ignored and become a ‘blind spot’.
| M4-a
Do you sometimes have to take risks that make you feel uncomfortable about safety? |
M4-b
Are some risky activities now normalised where you work? If so, what are they and what are the consequences? |
| M4-c
Are you aware of safety problems that are not being addressed sufficiently? If so, what barriers are in place? |
M4-d
How can you help to make sure that care safety problems are acted upon and resolved rather than ignored? |
Safety culture cards