On April 15, the RCSI Graduate School of Healthcare Management and Dr Siobhán McCarthy brought together a coalition of stakeholders to discuss quality improvement and patient safety research priorities. The full-day event comprised a World Café for healthcare professionals, followed by a hybrid symposium of national and international speakers and consultation exercise among patient representatives, healthcare professionals, academics and scholars.
Professor Deborah McNamara, Consultant General and Colorectal Surgeon at Beaumont Hospital, Co-Lead of the National Clinical Programme for Surgery, and Vice President of RCSI highlighted the huge volume of research, audit and improvement data undertaken across RCSI and nationally.
The 120 symposium attendees heard Prof McNamara align these activities to HSE National Patient Safety Strategy 2019-2024 and mark where huge progress has been made and the contributory factors. Prof McNamara commented that “to enhance how we do improvement work, a key factor in successful efforts, improvement needs to happen nearer the data”.
Overall the consultation identified the need to continue to address the known systemic causes of harm in the Irish healthcare system, but to pay more attention to those groups most at risk. People wanted more implementation and evaluation of practical solutions for patient and staff safety, in a just fashion, across population groups.
The consultation event was organised in support of the new Evidence-based Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (EQUIPS) Research Network, which will be formally launched in October 2024, and marks a collaboration across seven universities and HSE knowledge users and patient representatives, with funding from the HRB and HSE.
A selection of symposium presentations are available here in the RCSI Repository, an open-access repository of research and scholarly output from the RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences.
