Beyond Insight – getting to grips with patient safety intelligence in mental health services.

Reason to attend If you are developing a Patient Safety Incident Response Plan or Strategy. If you are a Board member or Senior leader in the mental health sector who wants more insight around what is happening within services. If you have a specific improvement programme underway which need to be underpinned with good data and analysis. If you are working within a system where collaborative patient safety initiatives are underway.

This event will draw on the vast experience Niche has in the area of mental health patient safety, together with its sophisticated analytical approaches to investigating these issues. The event will offer you deep insights into this area with delegates hearing from both the Niche team and other recognised mental health experts from the NHS.

You will hear some core insights gained from hundreds of investigations and reviews of closed cultures. You will be able to consider approaches to assessing mental health patient safety and see how us of a ‘trigger tool’ can be a game changer in mental health.

We will show you a range of approaches to looking at safety in your environment depending on existing local awareness of a problem, and existing understanding of causes and solutions. Our unique ‘Knowledge conversion quadrant’ approach will show you how different services and issues fall into different boxes in this quadrant, and we will show you how to apply a mix of qualitative and quantitative work to address each corresponding approach.

The integrated mental health trigger tool can show you how to quantify patient safety issues to support all ‘safe today’ and strategic improvement programmes.

Why is this topic important?

In an era where higher acuity is demanded from mental health services which are experiencing stretched budgets, low staff morale, and higher staff sickness rates, the ability to ‘spot the signs’ of a service in distress is no longer optional, it is vital.

The quality and safety of NHS mental health services have been under intense scrutiny in recent months, with a series of high-profile scandals and investigations exposing poor care and abuse of patients. Reports on such issues often state how leaders didn’t see the signs or didn’t take action when they had emerging insight. As a result, there is a huge demand for an ‘easy to incorporate’ data-driven response which answers the question “How do I know if my services are operating safely?” – this is the single most important question in healthcare provision, regulation and commissioning today.

The complications of getting to the root causes of mental health safety issues are generally well known:

• Is the issue due to staffing levels, staff vacancies, and the use of bank and agency? Perhaps affected by the seniority and longevity of ward and team managers?
• Is it an issue of clinical practice pertaining to the therapeutic model of care e.g., the use of restraint or the use of drug therapy as a single modality?
• Is it an issue of a closed culture that has allowed such practice to go unchecked? This may be impacting incident reporting, resulting in safety flags not being raised.
• Are there much softer issues that can potentially be explanatory, such as a lack of MDT working, the absence of nurses in MDT meetings, poor staff survey results, or a lack of service user engagement? Do these softer issues all point towards a problematic care environment resulting in poor patient safety?

Of course, it could be all of these. To truly understand patient safety within services, one must be able to ‘join the dots’ to understand what has gone wrong when an issue is highlighted and, more importantly, be able to identify when safety could be compromised to allow for earlier intervention.

About Niche - Our extensive and rounded credentials

Niche offers a unique blend of the most senior mental health investigatory professionals in the country combined with top-level data science tools and techniques honed by delivering analytical solutions in mental health for the last three decades.

• We have been the leading suppliers of independent mental health homicide investigations for the last decade. We have a wealth of knowledge on what works well and how to spot early warning signals when care may be compromised. We have delivered over 150 high-profile mental health care and treatment reviews and so our knowledge of the mental health system is unparalleled.
• Mental health modelling and data analytics are our core expertise. We have delivered modelling-led assignments across all mental health care pathways ranging from individual services within trusts to whole system ICB projects.
• We have delivered ‘deep dives’ into very high-profile mental health services recently using techniques outlined here. These involve utilising our investigatory and data science teams in comprehensive, intelligence-led, and sensitive cases with successful engagement being made between multiple parties.