Patient Safety Committee

Upholding patient safety and ensuring the highest standards of patient care are core values of the College and at the heart of all the work the College undertakes. Patient safety is embedded in the rigorous professional standards that run through all our educational, examination and audit activities. The College team works hard to improve safety for patients, for surgeons, for teams, for organisations - for all.

Patient Safety Key Resources

RCSEd Patient Safety Approach

The Patient Safety Committee acts as the voice of professional conscience on matters of patient safety within the College. Bringing together a team of multidisciplinary professionals, the PSC interacts with the activity of teams across the College to foster and encourage a culture of continuous improvement, by ensuring that the standards, advocacy, policy, and educational activities of the College are developed in a way that will improve patient outcomes.

The RCSEd Patient Safety Board was first established in 2008 following the development of the NOTSS (Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons) taxonomy. Under the successive stewardship of Professor George Youngson and Mr Simon Paterson Brown, the board worked to promote understanding of human factors in surgery. Today, NOTSS programmes are an integral part of the RCSEd education portfolio and an established part of surgical training worldwide.

To build on the hugely successful work of this board, the new RCSEd Patient Safety Committee was launched in August 2018. It supports and co-ordinates existing RCSEd patient safety initiatives, setting a proactive safety agenda for the College.

A critical factor in ensuring patient safety is through improving the wellbeing of the surgical workforce and we are dedicated to improving the delivery of safe surgical care within the working environment for all involved. Through liaising with external bodies, establishing links with sister organisations, publishing influential reports and running sector-wide campaigns, we seek to influence healthcare policy to enhance patient safety.

How the Patient Safety Committee Improves Patient Safety

The PSC does this by:

• Providing RCSEd members and fellows with expertise and advice on patient safety issues, for example, through the recent Patient Safety webinar, blog and podcast series.
• Promoting good practice and co-ordinating training to improve the safety of surgical care, such as the Surgical Ward Round Toolkit web resource.
• Increasing awareness of clinical human factors to improve the safety of surgical care, for example, helping to co-ordinate various training resources (Non-Technical Skills for Surgeons (NOTSS), PINTS and DeNTS) and developing collaborations with national human factors groups (e.g. Clinical Human Factors Group).
• Working with medical educators, NHS bodies, and other Royal Colleges to promote transparent, collaborative, and supportive care.
• Raising the importance of healthcare workers’ resilience and wellbeing in ensuring patient safety.
• Improving the surgical workplace environment by supporting surgical teams and helping to address conflict within them.
• Promoting RCSEd campaigns, such as the hugely successful Anti-bullying and undermining campaign #letsremoveit, where safety is enhanced through continuous learning rather than blame, and the recent SexualHarrasment #letsremoveit campaign, where all in the surgical and dental workforce are supported and treated with respect.
• Encouraging RCSEd Fellows and Members to provide feedback from their Team Based Quality Review meetings to promote a culture of learning; we work closely with the Scottish Morbidity and Mortality Programme, CORESS, and NHS England Patient Safety Strategy.
• Providing resources to supporting the surgical team when mistakes happen in surgery.
• Ensuring RCSEd representation on national audits of practice, such as NCEPOD (National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcomes and Death).
• Providing information and support on informed consent, through the successful ICoNS course.
• Promoting best practice in Duty of Candour.
• Contributing to policy consultations and influencing policy makers.

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