Most of us will need to use the NHS at some point in our lives, whether it’s a hip replacement as we get older, the birth of a child or even to save our life due to an injury or illness.

In our hour of need the very worst that could happen is that we suffer avoidable harm because of negligence in the treatment and care we receive. That means that the failures could and should have been avoided. It is a wretched fact that some patients become the victims of needless harm.

The Government has pledged to improve patient safety. But all the best laid plans in the world risk falling at the first hurdle if there is no overarching and co-ordinated strategy.

Preventing needless deaths and injuries must be a key pillar of plans to improve the NHS. Currently, there is a fragmented approach to safety and it is clearly not working.

There are so many safety frameworks, schemes, and reporting mechanisms that it lacks cohesion. It means best practice is not shared and does not become the benchmark.

For positive change to take place there needs to be strong leadership, with all-encompassing links between patients, regulators, healthcare providers, and policymakers.

Ensuring patients are not the victims of negligent care must be a key focus. Quality of care needs to be enshrined into the system, with mechanisms in place to ensure all healthcare staff work to the same high standards.

One key element to improving patient safety would be the wholesale application of the NHS legal requirement of a ‘duty of candour’, which means healthcare staff must be open and honest with patients and their families when things go wrong.

Compliance with the duty of candour is sporadic at best, despite various programmes to make it commonplace. Without transparency, when things have gone wrong and systems in place to learn from mistakes, vital lessons are not learned. It leads to the same patterns of harm being repeated time and again.

This lack of openness also serves to compound the heartache for families even further.

Everyone involved in healthcare must be on the same page, working to the same guidelines and standards to keep patients safe.

The NHS in the UK should be the envy of world, serving as a model to other countries as to what can be achieved when safe health care, with patients at its core, is available to all.

*Read APIL’s response to Patient Safety Commissioner - The Principles of Better Patient Safety – consultation here.