Published at 11:54, Friday, 27 March 2009

THE trust which runs Furness General Hospital is in the top ten of healthcare organisations for the time taken to report safety incidents.

The University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Trust reported incidents to the National Patient Safety Agency within an average of 12 days, when the national average was 57 days.

The NPSA report, which has been released publicly for the first time this year, showed that UHMBT’s in the top ten of all trusts and joint first place for trusts of a comparable size (large acute).

Between April and September last year, there were 1,625 incidents submitted to the NPSA’s Reporting and Learning System (RLS) by UHMBT.

In the six-month period, 72.1 per cent of the incidents reported were classed as causing no harm to patients (national average is 66 per cent), 23.1 per cent as low harm, four per cent as moderate harm, zero per cent as severe harm and 0.2 per cent as causing death.

The national average for severe harm or death is just over one per cent.

Peter Dyer, medical director at UHMBT, said: “This is a tremendous achievement for the trust and all our staff.

“Patient safety is and will remain the most important thing and we are committed to continually developing to ensure that the experience patients receive whilst in our hospitals is a positive one.

“One effective way of doing this is to maintain the strong reporting culture among our staff and learn from any incidents that do happen.”

Published by http://www.nwemail.co.uk