Objective: To identify patient safety monitoring strategies
in primary care.
Design: Open-ended questionnaire survey.
Participants: A total of 113 healthcare professionals
returned the survey from a group of 500 who were invited
to participate achieving a response rate of 22.6%.
Setting: North-West London, United Kingdom.
Method: A paper-based and equivalent online survey was
developed and subjected to multiple stages of piloting.
Respondents were asked to suggest strategies for monitoring
patient safety in primary care. These monitoring suggestions
were then subjected to a content frequency
analysis which was conducted by two researchers.
Main Outcome measures: Respondent-derived monitoring
strategies.
Results: In total, respondents offered 188 suggestions for
monitoring patient safety in primary care. The content analysis
revealed that these could be condensed into 24 different
future monitoring strategies with varying levels of
support. Most commonly, respondents supported the suggestion
that patient safety can only be monitored effectively
in primary care with greater levels of staffing or with additional
resources.
Conclusion: Approximately one-third of all responses
were recommendations for strategies which addressed
monitoring of the individual in the clinical practice environment
(e.g. GP, practice nurse) to improve safety. There was
a clear need for more staff and resource set aside to allow
and encourage safety monitoring. Respondents recommended
the dissemination of specific information for monitoring
patient safety such as distributing the lessons of
significant event audits amongst GP practices to enable
shared learning.