The Seven Steps are core to patient safety in healthcare organisations. The seven steps to patient safety in general practice provides a checklist to help staff to plan their activities and measure patient safety performance.
Step 1: Build a safety culture
A good safety culture is one where staff have a constant and vigilant awareness of the potential for things to go wrong, are able to identify and acknowledge mistakes, learn from them, and take action to put things right in order to make patient care safer.
Step 2: Lead and support the practice team
Improvements in patient safety do not just happen. They need the right culture, good leadership, well trained and supported staff and the right systems.
Step 3: Integrate risk management activities
Risk management is built into many aspects of a practices work: complaints handling, infection control, monitoring environmental risks, protecting vulnerable children, protecting staff, insurance and reviewing repeat prescriptions before they are signed.
Step 4: Promote reporting
Learning from what happens in one practice can prevent harm to patients in other practices. Only if we share our experiences can others learn from us and can we learn from others.
Step 5: Involve and communicate with patients and the public
Your practice team comprises experts in health and healthcare; however each of your patients is an expert in their own health, what they want to achieve, how they wish to live and how they want to ensure quality of life and wellbeing.
Step 6: Learn and share safety lessons
When something goes wrong (or could have gone wrong) the important issue is not to apportion blame but to understand what you can do to prevent it happening again. For this, you need to know what happened, how, why and what can be done to stop it from happening again.
Step 7: Implement solutions to prevent harm
All practices should aim to embed any lessons learned into their everyday work. There can be many reasons for not acting on learning, for example, lack of time, lack of a safety culture, dysfunctional relationships.
