Introduction to Patient Safety in Primary Care course for GPs

This session will provide an overview of key patient safety issues and challenges in primary care. It will also explain why improving patient safety requires us to look at the healthcare system, not just to focus on an individual healthcare provider.

This session was reviewed by Khyati Bakhai and last updated in December 2020.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session you will be able to:

• Recognise how an understanding of patient safety relates to competent performance as a GP
• Identify why blaming an individual healthcare provider when an incident occurs will impede the ability to learn and increase the chances that the same incident will recur
• Explain what is meant by the ‘systems approach’ to understanding human error and incidents
• Summarise the evidence-base showing the scale and types of incidents that occur in primary care
• Identify the organisations and national initiatives that aim to improve patient safety in the NHS

Every year millions of patients are treated safely in the NHS. However, for a minority of patients, errors and incidents occur which lead to patient harm.