Dr Jane O’Hara is Associate Professor based in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Leeds and the Quality and Safety Research team at Bradford Institute for Health Research.
Jane has recently been successful in attracting funding from NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research to conduct a programme of work entitled ‘Patient and family involvement in serious incident investigations: Developing and testing national and local guiding processes’.
Here Jane talks about this research:
This programme addresses an important need to improve how we learn from patient safety events, to reduce future harm to patients. NHS policy guidance is to involve patients and families in serious incident investigations. However currently there is little evidence to guide organisations in how to involve patients and families meaningfully in investigations, to support learning and improve their experience of this difficult process. Our aim for this research is to co-design new processes, to support NHS staff to involve patients and families in serious incident investigations. We will do this at a national and local level and test these processes to understand their impact upon experience and learning.
We will begin with an exploration of current policy and literature. Next, we will interview patients, families, investigators and staff to develop our understanding of their experience. Following this, we will co-design three linked processes to involve patients and families in serious incident investigations, within national investigations, mental health, and acute care settings. Finally, we will test these new processes within 25 investigations across five organisations, observing how they work in practice, and explore the experiences of those involved and the impact on learning.