Patient experiences of safety

Objective: The importance of involving patients in reporting on safety is increasingly recognised. Whilst studies have identified barriers to clinician incident reporting, few have explored barriers and facilitators to patient reporting of safety experiences. This paper explores patient perspectives on providing feedback on safety experiences. Design/Participants: Patients (n=28) were invited to take part in semi-structured interviews when given a survey about their experiences of safety following hospital discharge. Transcripts were thematically analysed using NVivo10. Setting: Patients were recruited from four hospitals in the UK. Results: Three themes were identified as barriers and facilitators to patient involvement in providing feedback on their safety experiences. The first, cognitive-cultural, found that whilst safety was a priority for most, some felt the term was not relevant to them because safety was the ‘default’ position, and/or because safety could not be disentangled from the overall experience of care. The structural-procedural theme indicated that reporting was facilitated when patients saw the process as straightforward, but that disinclination or perceived inability to provide feedback was a barrier. Finally, learning and change illustrated that perception of the impact of feedback could facilitate or inhibit reporting. Conclusions: When collecting patient feedback on experiences of safety, it is important to consider what may help or hinder this process, beyond the process alone. We present a staged model of prerequisite barriers and facilitators, and hypothesise that each stage needs to be achieved for patients to provide feedback on safety experiences. Implications for collecting meaningful data on patients' safety experiences are considered. The Health Foundationhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1369-762