Patient Safety Zone

Ensuring patients receive care that is safe and of high quality is an essential part of modern healthcare. To help with this, there are growing numbers of evidence-based Quality Improvement (QI) methods that can help practitioners to assess and improve the care they provide. However, for many, the experience of QI has often been felt to be “audit for audits sake” or a huge amount of work in an ever-increasing workload.

To make things easier, this resource describes several QI methods that will be useful for all members of the primary care team, including GP specialty trainees, who wish to better understand and apply QI thinking and tools more effectively. It will also be helpful in supporting the wider goals of GP Quality Clusters in Scotland and the Scottish Patient Safety Programme. Similarly, application of these methods also provides important evidence of QI activity within medical appraisal, specialty training and continuing professional development more generally for clinicians and managers alike.