Safety First

The National Patient Safety Agency aims to put patient safety at the top of the NHS agenda

The below statement is a factual summary written by The National Patient Safety Agency on their use of SAS® software.

“Within the Patient Safety Division we collect, analyse and prioritise data on patient safety incidents across all healthcare settings in the NHS in England and Wales. We aim to improve patient safety by:

• Collecting and analysing information on patient safety incidents from local NHS organisations, NHS staff, patients and careers.
• Taking into account other safety-related information from a variety of existing reporting systems.
• Learning lessons and ensuring that they are fed back into health care and treatment is organised and delivered .
• Ensuring that where risks are identified, work is undertaken on producing solutions to prevent harm, and to specify national goals and establish mechanisms to track progress.

We now have more than 1.6 million reports in our database, comprising detailed information on patient safety incidents describing what happened – including the outcome for the patient. Since the inception of the national database in 2003, the NPSA has used SAS® products to store, manipulate and analyse this data.

SAS products are used to produce data for detailed themed reports from the Patient Safety Observatory. We also use SAS to produce quarterly data summaries: overviews of all data reported to us on patient safety incidents as well as individual comparative feedback reports for each NHS organisation in England and Wales.

We have also taken advantage of SAS® Professional Services to help us improve the way we use SAS products.

The Statistics team also identify and extract reports for individual scrutiny. We need to access information with the greatest potential for learning and action to reduce harm to patients – and we need to be able to get to the most important things quickly. For example, all reports of death or severe harm sent to us are reviewed to enable the NHS to share learning and act on most serious risks rapidly.

SAS is used to run ‘one-off’ queries – often in response to a concern raised by clinicians, or sometimes in response to a request from the Department of Health.

The analysis of data continues to be a core function of the NPSA; a core function which is supported by a range of SAS products”.

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