Medical Audits provide bespoke mobile auditing solutions including a Safety Thermometer audit tool to facilitate easy collection of the data and automated upload directly into the NHS Safety Thermometer data entry tool.
The Classic Safety Thermometer was originally designed by the NHS in collaboration with over 160 different healthcare providers to develop a local improvement tool for ‘measuring, monitoring and analysing patient harms and ‘harm free’ care.
This standardised system of measurement provides the opportunity for all organisations where care is delivered to benchmark against each other in a meaningful, standardised way.
The Safety Thermometer tool is a spot check of patient’s harmed during their care or during the interactions with healthcare providers across the NHS.
NEXT GENERATION SAFETY THERMOMETER AUDITS
The next generation of Safety Thermometer tools have been designed to meet the specialist requirements of Maternity services, Children and Young people’s services and Mental Health services as well as support safe medication practice across all areas of healthcare.
Since the launch of the Classic Safety thermometer, an increasing number of healthcare providers have begun to complete these ‘next generation’ Safety Thermometer’ audits.
All the audit tools for Medication Safety Thermometer, Mental Health Safety Thermometer , Maternity Safety Thermometer and Children & Young People Safety Thermometer are available on the NHS Safety Thermometer home page.
The Maternity Safety Thermometer
The Maternity Safety Thermometer measures harm from Perineal and/or Abdominal Trauma, Post-Partum Haemorrhage, Infection, Separation from Baby and Psychological Safety.
The Maternity Safety Thermometer also helps the NHS identify babies with an Apgar of less than Seven at Five Minutes and/or those who are admitted to a Neonatal Unit.
The Medication Safety Thermometer
The Medication Safety Thermometer measures Medication management including Reconciliation, Allergy Status, Medication Omission, and Identifying harm from high risk medicines in support of Domain 5 of the NHS Outcomes Framework.
The Mental Health Safety Thermometer
The Mental Health Safety Thermometer is another national tool that has been designed to measure commonly occurring within mental health services specifically.
This point of care audit tool helps to measure harm in relation to patients who may self-harm, the psychological safety of patients, any violence and aggression towards patients, medication omissions and levels of restraint used on inpatients in mental health services.
The children and young people's services Safety Thermometer
The children and young people's services Safety Thermometer has been in development since mid 2014 and is based somewhat on the SCAN tool.
This Safety thermometer tool measures levels of deterioration in children, Extravasation secondary to IV therapy, levels of perceived pain and Skin Integrity issues