Caring is data-driven: rethinking incident management as the foundation of safer healthcare

I made many mistakes during my clinical career. Most of them were, on the face of it, of little significance. Being late for a shift. Forgetting to complete an item of paperwork. Missing the dreaded early hours on-call bleep because tiredness had momentarily overcome me. Trivial issues of themselves, it may seem. And none of them led to any matter of consequence. No investigation ensued; an irritated phone call from a colleague maybe; a sense of having let someone down or of professional shortcoming. But nothing more than that.

Looking back, I see now that each of these scenarios was not only a source of possible – or, on occasion, probable – harm, it was also an opportunity for me to learn and improve. That harm went unnoticed and certainly unreconciled to any action or omission of mine. That learning was unstructured and unshared. The incidents I unwittingly created existed only in my mind or the temperament of those around me. The culture in which I worked was one that saw long hours as a badge of honour, relentless career aspiration, get on with the next thing and do what you’re told by the boss.

So much for those early days. Where are we now? What does our approach to incident management tell us about the culture of a healthcare provider?

Incident management may be assumed to start with the simple first principle that something has occurred that ought to be captured and explored. But there is more to it than that. Something even more basic and foundational. There must be a belief that the practice of hunting out, describing and sharing instances where things happened that ought not to have happened, is a core part of doing a good job. Of being a professional, compassionate person. Developing, not detracting from, a wider workplace culture of safety, improvement and excellence.

And that belief is rooted in managerial leadership at all levels of seniority, across all disciplines. At all times. Manifest in the words and actions of those in positions of influence. Evidenced in the accurate, objective and accessible data those words and actions stem from or lead to.

Shared by all. Understood by all. Celebrated by all. Everything else in the culture of those institutions which are charged with the care of people at their moments of clinical vulnerability – from hospitals to residential homes – starts from there.

My pride in the class-leading technology solutions that RLDatix provides to so many professionals in all of those settings arises because of my lived experience of seeing the benefits it brings to those staff who adopt and embrace it, to their employers, and fundamentally to patients, service users, and their loved ones. It is then deepened by the reality that not only are we offering a superb incident management product, we are also embracing the best possible elements of data analytics and AI into that offer such that everyone engaged in the business of improving care – and that is all of us – can approach that vital activity with confidence and ease. Providing care can be difficult. Engaging in opportunities to collaboratively improve it should not be.

Because what our patients need from us now is active involvement in an integrated governance approach—connecting incidents, risks, complaints, claims, mortality, audits, policies and improvement activity to create a fuller picture of safety. We have a wealth of data. We may sometimes struggle to grasp its true significance. The next best action to undertake in addressing what needs to be done might not be clear. RLDatix seeks to recognise and improve that. We call that functionality, unsurprisingly, RLD Intelligence.

The intelligence we need in providing safe and effective care is that of a caring mind. Compassion is not stroking the hand of a needlessly-bereaved parent and looking past the data insights that might have averted that catastrophe; compassion is the recognition that the data is crucially important, that understanding it is crucially important, that acting on it together – now, in collaboration, from top to bottom and side to side within a healthcare team – is crucially important. Caring is, on that foundational level, a data-driven thing.

When we think like that, and act like that, using data intelligently, welcoming the opportunities we have to gather it, embracing the technology at hand to interrogate it, and sharing those insights calmly, widely, proportionately and with meaning, we start to construct the scaffold of a truly just and psychologically safe culture. At RLDatix we are acutely aware of our responsibilities to help that scaffolding be strong, secure and long-lasting such that we can lay the bricks and mortar of celebrating our involvement in incident management and build tall. We see it as an absolute privilege. Together, we can change and improve the culture of safety in healthcare in ways that junior doctor all those years ago never dreamed were possible.