About us
What is the Scottish Patient Safety Programme?
The Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) is a unique national programme that aims to improve the safety and reliability of healthcare and reduce harm, whenever care is delivered. From an initial focus on acute hospitals, our work now includes safety improvement programmes for the following areas:
The Healthcare Quality Strategy for NHSScotland has three quality ambitions to provide safe, effective, person-centred care. SPSP is key to the delivery of these ambitions and supports the Scottish Government's 2020 Vision to provide safe, high quality care, whatever the setting.
How does the Programme work?
The Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) is led and co-ordinated nationally, supporting implementation within NHS boards through local teams within hospitals, GP practices, mental health inpatients units and community pharmacies.
The programme is delivered through a collaborative approach based on the Breakthrough Series Collaborative Model, using national learning sessions to bring NHS boards together to share and learn from each other interspersed with action periods where local teams test and implement changes using improvement methodology - The Model for Improvement (PDF, 2MB) - to bring about improvements in care provision.
The programme is supported by a range of stakeholders including NHS Education for Scotland (NES).