Ensuring the safety of everyone who comes into contact with health services is one of the most important challenges facing health care today.
Patient safety is the process by which an organisation makes patient care safer. This should involve : risk assessment, the identification and management of patient-related risks; the reporting and analysis of incidents; and the capacity to learn from and follow-up on incidents and implement solutions to minimise the risk of them occurring (source: Seven steps to patient safety)
The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) is a Special Health Authority created to co-ordinate the efforts of all those involved in healthcare, and more importantly to learn from patient safety incidents occurring in the NHS.
A new, flexible IT system for distributing alerts, CAS subsumes the Safety Alert Broadcast System (SABS) and Public Health Link (PHL) into a more robust and suitable technology for distributing safety alerts, emergency alerts, drug alerts, Dear Doctor letters, and MDA alerts.
