“We all know deep down that there’s a little bit of Mid Staffs in every trust.” A senior pharmacist told The Journal this at a Royal Pharmaceutical Society event this week. It is a bold statement — uncomfortable, stomach-turning and most likely true.
It is tempting to seek to distance yourself from the Mid Staffs mess — to claim that that kind of catastrophic neglect could not possibly happen in your patch. Mid Staffs is an extreme case that highlights how wrongly things can go when organisational culture is fundamentally flawed and cash trumps care. But, painful as it might be, clinicians and managers should get as close as they can to QC Robert Francis’s report.
It is a call for action to ensure patients are considered first and foremost in the delivery of care. Ways that pharmacy can make a real impact post-Francis were the focus of the RPS event, held at the Law Society in London. The meeting brought together around 80 leaders and practitioners to discuss the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations through professional leadership.
Counsel to the Francis inquiry QC Tom Kark spoke at the event, where he acknowledged the lack of consultation with pharmacy throughout the inquiry. Keith Ridge, chief pharmaceutical officer for England, set out some of the Government’s next steps in the context of pharmacy and medicines optimisation.
The event really came alive in breakaway sessions, where participants collaborated to come up with actions in eight key areas: safety, information, transparency, accountability, consistency, assurance, culture change and strengthened regulation. If the outputs of the sessions are anything to go by, the RPS should be able to produce a hugely relevant report for the profession. But the discussion did not stop at the door and The Journal was impressed when, on Twitter (#RPSFrancis), RPS member Aamer Safdar made public his own personal pledges. He was part of the discussion about leading on safety, and we summarise his commitments here:
• To improve patient experience by giving patients information and explaining when things go wrong
• To empower trainees and staff to report incidents and poor practice; not to accept or tolerate poor practice
• To ask staff how they define their professional roles; what are their boundaries and when do they think it is not their problem?
• To ask staff how they define patient safety and what they would be happy to get into trouble over with regard to patient safety
• To inform students and trainees of pharmacists’ role in patient safety; what are their responsibilities and accountabilities?
He challenges colleagues to come up with their own pledges. At the very least, we say, pharmacists should read as much of the Francis report as they can bear.
