First Do No Harm

Salford Royal is by all accounts an excellent hospital. A few months ago the Trust was rated as ‘excellent’ for the quality of its services and the use of its resources by the independent Healthcare Commission. It also won the Patient Safety award at the HSJ awards the other week.

When you walk into entrance No 4 at Salford Royal Hospital you cannot fail to see a series of big posters that talk about Harm and the hospitals intention to reduce the amount of it people suffer in their facility. I assume that same posters are at other entrances as well. This is one of them.

Towards the bottom, in bold, the text says "at Salford Royal our harm rate of 38 (per 1000 occupied bed days) means that on average there are 850 patients that experience some harmful event each month. We plan to reduce the incidence of harm by 50%."

I was rushing to a meeting, 15 minutes late, after having to queue to get into the Trusts' not so excellent car park. But I had to stop and take some photos of the posters.

I've never seen a hospital in the UK be so transparent about it's harm rate and its' determination to make further improvements. Have you ever seen anything like this, so publicly available, in any hospital?

It may, at first sight, be an uncomfortable message but as Harriet Beecher Stowe said, "the truth is the kindest thing we can give folks in the end".

• Perhaps the pursuit of quality and patient safety is really beginning to permeate the culture in this place?
• Perhaps here clinicians and managers are, relatively speaking, more willing to openly acknowledge where they harm patients?
• Perhaps here patients and their family and friends are being treated as 'grown ups'? 
• Perhaps this Trust is on the cusp of doing great things?