Culture Card Workshop

Processes and systems can only take patient safety so far. Without a culture that enables people to speak honestly, report without fear and learn from both failures and successes, organisations can struggle to turn those systems into safer practice. In this interactive workshop from the Connected Health & Care Summit 2026, Helen Hughes, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Learning, and Clare Wade Director at Patient Safety Learning, lead a hands-on session using the NHS Scotland safety culture cards, a free resource that gives teams questions to help start difficult conversations about safety culture, learning and speaking up.

Watch Patient Safety Learning facilitate a workshop using the NHS Scotland safety culture cards, with table discussions on just culture, learning from incidents, staff support and what good practice looks like.

What the session covers and why the cards matter

This workshop introduces the NHS Scotland safety culture cards and puts them into practice through facilitated table discussions. The key themes were: 

• Safety culture is described as values, behaviours and beliefs in alignment. If leaders behave differently from stated values, the culture can become disconnected from the organisations stated values. 

• The cards are split into six safety culture domains, including just culture, reporting and learning. They do not give answers. They give the questions that teams can use to start conversations 

• Having the question on a card removes the personal confrontation of raising it directly, making it part of being psychologically safe 

• Table discussions surfaced persistent challenges: embedding learning on the frontline, supporting staff through investigations, disseminating lessons across organisations, and the gap between reporting incidents and seeing action taken 

<< Back to Sessions on Demand