SLIPPS (Shared LearnIng from Practice to improve Patient Safety) is a 3 year Erasmus+ funded Patient Safety education project.

The project will:

  • draw on the real experiences of health/social care students in practice placements
  •  utilise these experiences as the basis for a range of educational resources
  • set up an international patient safety education network
  • build an international open access virtual learning centre for international, multi-professional learning about patient safety

Who is involved?

  • 7 Higher Education institutions
  • 5 Health and/or social care providers
  • 5 European countries (UK, Finland, Spain, Italy and Norway)

The project is multidisciplinary and includes a range of Health and Social care professions

The project team encompasses health care educators, front line healthcare professionals, chief executive officers in health care, patient safety managers / coordinators, and experts in technology and simulation.

Background

SLIPPS is responding to the challenge to improve European patient safety competence and education. Errors, mishaps and misunderstandings are common and around 1 in 10 patients suffer avoidable harm (WHO 2014). The majority of adverse care episodes and near misses are preventable (Vlayen et al 2012) and such incidents impact upon patients, their families, health care organisations, staff and students.

In health care programmes, learning takes place in both academic and work placement settings (Tella et al 2015 a,b,c 2016,Pearson et al 2009, 2010, Steven et al. 2014). When participating in clinical practice learning, student healthcare professionals may witness or be involved in patient safety incidents of varying degrees which are not always recognised, recorded or challenged (Pearson et al 2009, Steven et al 2014,  Kiesewetter et al 2014, Felstead 2013, Henneman et al. 2010). Thus as highlighted by the work of Tella et al (2015 a,b,c 2016) which prompted the SLIPPs project, a valuable source of information about patient safety incidents remains untapped and potential learning opportunities are lost.

Stronger collaboration is needed to improve the culture of safety in clinical teaching and learning settings (Tregunno et al. 2014) and to alleviate tensions between academic and work place contexts which may negatively impact upon student learning (Tella et al 2015 a,b,c 2016, Steven et al. 2014). 

Given the potential impact of incidents on patients, staff and students it is important to develop:

  • tools and resources which assist students in: learning about types of patient safety incident; developing ‘resilience’; undertaking high quality research into patient safety incidents, safety culture and professional working
  • greater understanding of how witnessing or involvement in incidents influences students’ learning (and potentially future practice and culture)
  • greater understanding of patient safety incident diversity and frequency across professions, nations and health care systems

SLIPPS will draw on the real experience of students in clinical placements and seek to bridge the real or perceived divide between front line healthcare practice and those engaged in education and research.

In short…

  • You can find out much more about our project on this site. We have included details on the background studies, our project strategy and the expected outcomes.
  • Want to know who we are? You can find out much more about the consortium here.
  • Latest updates about the project? News and events covers all of that.
  • Want to contact us? Click here.