The first key question asked by the CQC is “Are services safe?”. By safe, they mean are people protected from abuse and avoidable harm? If we look at the description of safe from a quality statement perspective, it states: “Safety is a priority for everyone and leaders embed a culture of openness and collaboration. People…

There are many terms associated with significant events and they can all sound quite confusing – e.g., patient safety incident, near miss, never event, serious incident, significant event analysis (SEA), root cause analysis (RCA), learning event analysis (LEA), serious untoward incident (SUI), critical incident, and more. Just to add further confusion, primary and secondary care…

Do you ever have that ‘ooh err… not happy about those notes’ moments… when you look at something recorded by a clinician and think that there isn’t quite enough detail there to cover your back if the ‘you-know-what’ hits the big fat fan?! I have what you might call a medico-legal ‘bent’ (long story, won’t…

Part of a Practice Manager’s remit is to record Significant or Critical Events in order to encourage good practice and prevent such events from happening again. However, Significant and Critical are two separate things and one has to decide whether an event is approaching, or has reached a catastrophic or dangerous level. To illustrate the…

Talking to a practice manager who also happens to be a CQC inspector – expect an outstanding rating for that practice! – it seems that one of the areas practices frequently fall down on during inspections surrounds Significant Events. “The variation in how these processes are managed in practices is stark,” we were told. “Yet…