Improving Patient Safety Culture - A practical guide

NHS England and the AHSN Network have created a toolkit to give teams an understanding of how to craft, create and nurture a positive safety culture and provide a theoretical underpinning to how to shift the culture. The toolkit covers safety culture, teamwork and communication, just and restorative culture, psychological safety, promoting diversity inclusive behaviour, and civility.

Safety culture has been a key and recurring theme in reports where there has been poor care. Its ubiquity has hampered our understanding of what it is, and it has become apparent that it means different things to different people, and at different hierarchical levels. Without a common understanding of what we perceive safety culture to be, it is difficult to understand how to create a positive shift – this guide should go some way to creating a more uniform understanding.