Our services have a renewed shared purpose

Our purpose and values

Our services have a renewed shared purpose

To provide expertise to the NHS on resolving concerns fairly, share learning for improvement and preserve resources for patient care.

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Our priorities

Our primary focus for the future is to resolve concerns fairly.

However, we also have a duty to use what we know, to help to prevent the same thing happening again. We are not a patient safety body and we cannot succeed in isolation, however we have a unique contribution to make to the patient safety system.

We will achieve this by focusing on four priorities.

The benefits of these priorities will be tackling the rising costs of harm to the healthcare system and addressing the causes of harm with a joint objective to reduce serious brain injury at birth, shared with NHS Improvement, improving the experience of patients and healthcare staff when something goes wrong, and increased and earlier support for those providing NHS care who are involved in incidents.

Learn about how we want to deliver our strategy in the first year

 Read our Business Plan 2017/18

How we want to work is changing

Moving upstream in practice means a change in approach by us and by others at every stage of the process after an incident occurs.

In practice

The early notification scheme

We have asked our Members to report all maternity incidents to us within 30 days where babies have suffered severe brain injury as identified by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ Each Baby Counts Programme.

Fictional case story

Our strategy in action

This fictional case illustrates the future role of NHS Resolution in relation to cases of serious neurological injury at birth as described in our five-year strategy.

Further reading

What this means for patients

We wish to move away from formal legal proceedings where possible. The process rarely benefits either those who are injured and find themselves in the process to recover compensation, or 'future' patients for whose care public funds need to be preserved and for whom lessons need to be learned to prevent repeated incidents.

Further reading

Consulting on the future

In 2016 we undertook a comprehensive consultation on our main indemnity scheme, the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST). This has equipped us with valuable feedback to form this strategy and our plans for reforming the scheme for the next five years.

Learning from harm

Our strategy signals a move to an organisation which is more focused than before on prevention, learning and early intervention to address the rising costs of harm in the NHS.

Saying sorry leaflet

Resources

Saying sorry leaflet

Saying sorry meaningfully when things go wrong is vital for everyone involved in an incident, including the patient, their family, carers, and the staff that care for them.

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