A veteran is defined as “anyone who has served for at least one day in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces (Regular or Reserve) or Merchant Mariners who have seen duty on legally defined military operations”. And today (Friday) is Armistice Day; at the 11th hour, on the 11th day, of the 11th month in 1918, the…

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…

All organisations experience change, whether macroenvironmental or microenvironmental. In fact, change is ever present; it is inevitable. In primary care, there is no escaping change, be it changes to clinical processes, changes to clinical IT systems, changes to the structure of primary care, or changes to regulations. Of course, we have responded to many changes…

Just over a year ago, I wrote the ‘Continuing to sail on the sea of CQC change’ blog, and 18 months earlier, I wrote the ‘CQC: Big changes are on the horizon’ blog. Today, we’re still at sea, sailing along, encountering change over every horizon. But could it be that the good ship ‘CQC’ is…

The NHS “is there to improve our health and wellbeing, supporting us to keep mentally and physically well, to get better when we are ill and, when we cannot fully recover, to stay as well as we can to the end of our lives” (NHS Constitution for England). Such a powerful statement and coupled with…

When a referee blows their whistle during a rugby match, the game stops, everyone looks towards the ref, the players listen to what’s being said, a discussion is had, then the game continues. Listening is key in this scenario as the players want to understand why the ref blew their whistle and what it means…

There are always lots of questions asked about mandatory training. What does mandatory training cover? Who needs to do what particular training? When do you need to do refresher training? Where is the training to be done? Maybe you’ve also been asked, “Why do I need to do it?” If you’re left thinking, “I can’t…