A new national Patient Safety Incident Management system (PSIMS) is planned to be introduced in Spring 2021. Ahead of the launch of the system, Radar Healthcare has passed compliance testing with NHS Improvement.
The new system from NHS Improvement will be introduced to replace the current National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) – with healthcare providers needing to ensure the software they use, or are planning to use, is compatible with the PSIMS.
To understand more about the topic, HTN spoke with Mark Fewster, Head of Product at Radar Healthcare, a supplier of a software system that supports healthcare providers to manage quality and compliance.
Mark said: “PSIMS is an NHS Improvement project to replace the current National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) and Strategic Executive Information System (StEIS). It should offer better support for staff from all health and care sectors to record safety events and provide greater insight and analysis – aiding national and local safety improvement.
“For larger NHS organisations, such as trusts and foundation trusts, they usually have a dedicated local risk management system (LRMS) such as Radar Healthcare to capture these events.
“PSIMS state that healthcare providers which currently record patient safety incidents on Local Risk Management System (LRMS) software will need to assure themselves that their software suppliers are using, or have a plan to move to, PSIMS-compatible products, so they are able to:
- Connect with PSIMS to record and share details of patient safety events with the national NHS system, and access learning to support safety improvement
- Fulfil their obligations to report certain notifiable incidents to the Care Quality Commission
- Maintain their ability to share certain patient safety events with other national organisations, including MHRA and PHE, to reduce the need for duplicate reporting.
“A key point with PSIMS is that it will move data capture towards a non-discretionary fixed set of questions, with a fixed set of responses, leading to a more consistent set of results for the NHS”, Mark said.
“In the longer term, as PSIMS is embedded, we’ll start to see that data become more available and accurate, and therefore actionable. We want to take this opportunity to access the central data set stored, which will open up opportunities for benchmarking the trust’s performance and will provide a greater level of analytics.
“A trust will also be able to understand their capability in other areas of the organisation as a whole, but also see where risk is occurring outside of the individual trust which can then be potentially avoided.
“The data will be really what makes the difference.”
HTN recently reported on the software system from Radar Healthcare being implemented at Somerset NHS Foundation Trust.
To find out more, please visit the Radar Healthcare website.
