Mastering adverse outcomes

I set up doctors advancing Patient safety (DAPS) at St Peter’s Hospital at the beginning of 2009 to empower junior doctors to make improvements to the care of their patients; to move away from the traditional academic audit and carry out useful quality improvement projects with real interventions. Since then, junior doctor colleagues have carried out many quality improvement projects from antibiotics, radiology, nutrition, DNR status, medical ward rounds and more.

Moving from St Peter’s to St George’s, Sarah Hammond, a consultant anaesthetist joined me in running DAPS. Together we have run quality improvement projects, set up a Student Safety Forum, offered Special Study Modules, developed a publication for junior doctors around error reporting, taken junior doctors on a tour to a Services Hospital in Lahore to carry out quality improvement work with junior doctors there, jointly run a patient safety conference with the Royal Society of Medicine and have produced a set of videos featuring advice for new F1 doctors. We have even more plans for the future.

The best part about DAPS is that anyone can get involved, whether that be a quality improvement project, in our publication Reporting for Duty, international safety tour, etc. We have produced a comprehensive set of materials for carrying out a quality improvement project so anyone, anywhere can take part.

The quality improvement project I have been most impressed with saw two of our DAPP doctors and two doctors from Lahore develop a solution to explain discharge medication information to illiterate patients. The potential benefit of the intervention was groundbreaking and will significantly reduce morbidity and mortality for patients in the third world.

We are extremely proud of what we have achieved in DAPS in such a short space of time, whether that be engaging healthcare students in patient safety or developing a checklist to improve ward rounds. We are looking forward to the future to see how we can positively shape the landscape of healthcare in the years to come.

To get involved or simply see what we’re doing, visit our website www.daps.org.uk.