Newcastle NIHR Patient Safety Research Collaborative (PSRC) - SafetyNet, by Professor Andy Husband

The Newcastle NIHR PSRC is focused on creating research into patient safety for those people affected by multiple long-term conditions (MLTCs). This occurs when patients are affected by two or more long-term illnesses and is associated with poor health outcomes. MLTCs are becoming increasingly common in our population and the age at which patients acquire multiple illnesses is falling, meaning people affected in this way are losing years of healthy living. In addition, we know that people who come from deprived areas of our country or those from minority ethnic communities are disproportionately affected by MLTCs and the poor health outcomes that accompany this problem. Our research is designed to try and understand how this population are exposed to greater safety risks than might otherwise be the case. Patients who experience MLTCs have greater exposure to healthcare interventions, are generally treated with more medicines and are managed by multiple healthcare providers for the various issues they have. Altogether, this has the potential to increase risk for this group and our PSRC is designed to identify those risks and develop approaches to treatment that may improve patient safety.

We have four areas of focus within the Newcastle NIHR PSRC - around the risks of taking multiple medicines, otherwise known as polypharmacy, how we use artificial intelligence to understand risk in care pathways, how we safely transfer care from one provider to another and how social and financial disadvantage have the potential to worsen the risk that people are exposed to within health and social care. In addition to this, we have PSRC resources to train new researchers in patient safety so that we can build a group that is sustainable in the long-term who can continue research into this area. We are funding numerous programmes of further study for healthcare professionals within our PSRC.

SafetyNet has been created as a way for the funded PSRCs in England to work together. This is an excellent opportunity for us to share our experience and expertise to maximise the outputs of the funding provided by NIHR. As a new PSRC in Newcastle, we must establish a brand-new collaborative, bringing together various academic leaders in patient safety research across our partner Universities and hospital trusts. The formation of SafetyNet allows us to learn from the previously funded PSTRCs to benefit from their experience. This has been invaluable for us during the initial stages of our award, providing peer support and outlining different ways of approaching some of the challenges of setting up our unit.

SafetyNet provides the platform to share expertise and create synergies across our research areas. We have created links across PSRCs between colleagues with methodological expertise, for example health economics or artificial intelligence. We will establish meetings of these groups, which in turn will develop collaborations, with a view to developing larger collaborative grant applications, addressing patient safety challenges on a much greater scale than would otherwise be the case.       

A key aspect of all PSRCs is the development of research capacity through the training and development of research staff who will eventually go on to be leaders in the patient safety research field. SafetyNet is providing opportunities for our trainees to network and socialise their research at an early stage in its development. We have the opportunity for our researchers to create meetings to formally share their work and early results or to focus on an individual discipline or research methodology, which has relevance for the PSRCs.

We are enthusiastic about the creation of SafetyNet and we look forward to it helping us to achieve out aims and objectives for the Newcastle NIHR PSRC moving forward over the next four years.