Safer care for all

In our report - Safer care for all - (published in September 2022) we examine the current state of professional health and care regulation in the UK. However we go beyond this in identifying and proposing solutions to some of the huge challenges facing health and social care today.

Our report considers four main themes:

1. Tackling inequalities
2. Regulating for new risks
3. Facing up to the workforce crisis
4. Accountability, fear and public safety

Next steps for Safer care for all and how it ties in with our strategic direction

We published Safer care for all in September 2022. Since then we have been carrying out extensive engagement with stakeholders (including by consulting on our draft Strategic Plan) to develop our focus for the next three years and plan for 2023-24.

During 2023/24 we intend to focus on the interlinked issues of workforce, inequalities and accountability. A recurring theme in our discussions with stakeholders was that of culture in health and care. We realise that the PSA, alone, cannot tackle poor workplace culture or the problems associated with it, but we hope that with the ambitious aims we've set out in our strategic plan, we can make a start and work with others to to highlight improvements needed to assure better and safer care for all.

1. Workforce – we know that workforce shortages impact patient safety as well as professionals’ workplace wellbeing. We want to focus on building the evidence base around the regulatory barriers. Working with regulators and wider stakeholders, we want to identify solutions to help create a more agile workforce as well as encourage innovation. We think this work will help us shape a practitioner regulatory strategy. We believe this is needed to support health and care workforce strategies across the four countries of the UK.  
2. Inequalities – in addition to the work we are doing to revise our expectations of how regulators will meet Standard 3 as part of our performance review process (Standard 3 of our Standards of Good Regulation is focused on regulators understanding the diversity of their registrants, patients and service users and not creating barriers through any of their processes/disadvantage people with protected characteristics), We are also introducing a new EDI standard for the Accredited Registers. Our work in this area will focus on engaging and convening stakeholders on key issues where we can add value and support action. This will include disseminating our consumer research on perceptions of discriminatory behaviour in health and care and looking at barriers to complaints and the role of healthcare professionals in tackling health inequalities.
3. Accountability – our main focus in this area will be to work with regulators to encourage clear messaging on the role of professional regulators when there have been serious failures of care. We also want to facilitate and encourage stakeholders to look at how to learn from serious patient safety incidents. This will include consideration of the wider issues we are aware of that may impact on professionals’ fear of regulation and wider accountability mechanisms, such as blame culture, barriers to candour and experience of ‘moral injury’ by healthcare professional involved in major failures of care.      
4. Safety system – work in this area will be primarily focused on building our evidence base on how the functions proposed for the Health and Social Care Safety Commissioner might be delivered in different ways across the four UK countries and engaging with existing bodies fulfilling some or all of these functions across the UK. We want to explore how improvements in the safety system might be achieved. We also intend to engage with stakeholders on the case for a more coordinated approach to public inquiries and reviews (through a Commissioner role or otherwise).     

We will continue having conversations with stakeholders as we take forward this work through the year so watch this space.

Take a closer look at the four issues