Commentary over many years has described the importance of meaningful family engagement following a patient safety incident. Failing to effectively involve patients and families excludes their experiences from investigations and perpetuates feelings that their voices are not heard.
To prevent such deaths requires health professionals to take a broader view of risk than ideation. This is also true for tragic homicides by people with acute mental illness. Health professionals need to listen attentively to the concerns of family members, and/or friends.
It is the role of the FLO to provide this support, create, manage and foster relationships, engender trust; facilitate communication and create links between any other professionals whose input is required and the families concerned facilitate communication and create links between any other professionals whose input is required and the families concerned.
Between four and ten women take their own lives each week in the UK because of domestic abuse. For families this is a dark, lonely and challenging place.
Many families report that they are afraid to raise concerns and complaints. They worry that doing so will have a negative impact on the support that their loved one receives, or that they will be further alienated from being involved in their loved ones lives. This has to change!
Many years ago, as a young woman, I also wanted to change the world. I wanted the inequalities within and between countries to be reduced.
He also spent half his life in hospitals in seven different NHS regions of the United Kingdom. Adam experienced the absolute best and the very worst of NHS care.
Like so many organisations, over the last year we’ve had to adjust to running on-line webinars, instead of face-to-face training. We learned a lot from our face-to-face training and now we’re using that knowledge in our webinars. In our old style training we travelled all over England, running all day training sessions for up to 150 heath care staff members (very often NHS Trusts) from all levels, from CEO and Governors to staff who worked in A&E, Maternity and Wards. With staff who worked in Mental Health, staff who worked with elderly people, with children, with people with Learning Disabilities …
The lead psychiatrist for the mental health trust phoned me. She was thoughtful, reflective and kind. I felt that she and her team were trying to reflect and learn.
I applied to join the Learning from Deaths: Learning and Action research Public and Relatives Steering Group in the hope that our family’s dreadful experience might be put to some good use. We don’t want other families to have to go through what we have suffered. I also knew that meeting other people who’d had harrowing experiences might be helpful to me because it might reduce my sense of isolation. The Steering Group was set up by the main researcher on the project, Dr Zoe Brummell, Anaesthetic and Intensive Care Trainee at University College London NHS Trust. The aim of …