Measuring and monitoring safety: a primary care perspective Thought paper
October 2013
Key points
- Professor Aneez Esmail considers the differences between primary care and other settings and explains that a variety of factors mean that assessing harm and safety in primary care remains a challenge.
- He identifies a number of existing tools that can be used to measure and monitor safety in primary care and considers what research will be needed in order to assess if care in a primary care organisation is safe.
Professor Aneez Esmail discusses the measurement and monitoring of safety from the perspective of primary care.
The Health Foundation is calling for a stepwise change in thinking about patient safety. This paper forms part of a programme of work we are undertaking to help answer the question: 'How do we know care is safe?' We want to build on a culture that has focused almost exclusively on measuring past harm and enhance this to incorporate approaches to measurement that also establish the presence of safety.
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