Championing a Positive Safety Culture in the Social Care Sector

At the start of the year, we set out to cultivate a positive safety culture and made significant progress around areas of incident reporting, safeguarding and whistleblowing. We developed this further when the Right Care Right Person Framework was introduced by the NHS and Police, consulting with our staff, residents, and participants on how safe they felt and what we could do to improve safety. Through focus groups and webinars, training, expert advice, and practical information, we’ve empowered colleagues, residents, and participants, fostering a culture of curiosity, learning and constructive feedback.

We introduced new processes and procedures for reporting Accidents, Incidents, and Near Misses (AINMs) and a new whistleblowing system. This change emphasises the importance of confidentiality, collaboration, and protection, and we have trained a team of Whistleblowing Champions from across the organisation as approachable experts who can give advice. We gained rich feedback around improving physical safety, including provision of ‘safe space’ in residential settings, review of de-escalation, breakaway and team regulation training, leadership commitment to safety ‘by design and default’, and review of relevant policies and procedures.

We also recognise our services’ challenging and unique safeguarding situations and have invested in comprehensive staff training to address complex care and support needs. Each service now has a trained local safeguarding lead who provides tailored support and training to meet the unique care requirements of the residents and participants they support.

Our efforts have led to a 75% increase in the average number of reported events, making our services safer for staff, residents and participants. We will provide more targeted staff training to encourage reporting and align our procedures with the NHS’s Patient Safety Incident Response Framework as best practice, normalising shared learning in response to AINMs, and ensuring our response and approach to learning is trauma informed.

Jenny Ralls, Director of Compliance, Risk and Internal Audit