Quality and Safe Care
High quality and safe care is of paramount importance to us at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust. We want you to have good experiences and the best possible outcome from the treatment and care your receive. We are also a learning organisation and are keen to review where things have not gone as expected, where we have not met your expectations or when errors have occurred.
To do this the Trust has a number of systems and processes that ensure there is continual review, responsiveness and assurance that we listen, review and identify where we can improve.
Patient Safety
The Patient Safety team work closely with clinical based staff and patients and relatives when incidents occur. We aim to be open and transparent, telling patients and relatives when things have not gone as expected and saying sorry when errors have occurred. This ensures we maintain good relationships with our service users and meet our statutory Duty of Candour requirements. Staff are expected to report all incidents to enable a review to take place, learning identified and changes made to reduce the risk of re-occurrence.
Where Serious Incidents occur (please see this national document for definitions of a Serious Incident: https://www.england.nhs.uk/patientsafety/serious-incident) the Trust will undertake an investigation to establish how the incident occurred, identify learning and implement an action plan to ensure change occurs. This process can take 3-4 months but is very thorough. We aim to keep servicer users involved and informed during the process.
Simple steps to keep you safe during your hospital stay
Resources
- Preventing hospital acquired blood clots
- Insertion and care of your cannula
- Preventing pressure ulcers
- Slips, trips and falls
- Outpatient services
- Patient information leaflet: our commitment to you when something may have gone wrong
Contact us
The Patient Safety team can be contacted by email at Mtw-tr.patientsafety@nhs.net or by telephone on 01622 729000 (extension 34055 or 28967).