Patient safety manual for primary care

Patient safety is a much broader concept than just clinical care. It hinges on access to care, confidentiality, medical equipment, information exchange, medication use, complaints handling, consultation duration, scope of practice, and responsiveness of the organisation to adverse events, among other things. Even the most dedicated and highly qualified GP will find there are aspects of their practice set-up that can be improved. In this collaborative practices will engage in elements of this broad scope to improve patient safety. This will
include a simple survey tool to assess the practice’s patient safety culture, to develop priorities for improvement, and focus on some specific areas.
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has developed a set of Standards to improve safety and quality in general practices. One of the RACGP Standards is for clinical risk management of near misses, slips, lapses or mistakes. These Standards are utilised by Australian General Practice Accreditation Limited and GPA Accreditation Plus for accreditation of Australian general practices.
The Australian Safety and Quality Framework for Health Care which has been endorsed by the Health Minsters in 2010 highlighted the need for safe and high quality care which has also been recognised by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care. It has been said that there is urgent need for “development of a nationally coordinated, systematic and effective means of reporting errors and near misses within primary health care”.