HSJ Patient Safety Awards 2017: Education and training

Working as a three way partnership delivered a “two stage” education and training process to promote Learning from Excellence. LFE is a method of learning from what goes right in healthcare using positive incident reporting supported by a structured learning process based around appreciative inquiry.

It’s clear excellence in healthcare is highly prevalent, but there is no formal system to capture it. We tend to regard excellence as something to gratefully accept, rather than something to study and understand. But LFE aims to provide a way of capturing excellence, learning from it and improving safety and quality based on that learning.

It’s also clear that this approach is often at odds with the predominant deficit focussed “find and fix errors” culture of healthcare, so the winning team wanted to help healthcare colleagues build confidence to use an LFE approach in their teams and organisations.

LFE has implications for safety improvement, wider quality improvement and staff morale and well being. The most significant achievement was the spread of LFE to a number of teams who are now actively using LFE.

The judges felt that this was a truly innovative approach that has the ability to transform the way we improve patient safety. This should be considered for national rollout both for patient safety and staff morale.