Welcome

Who are we and what is our mission?

While healthcare brings enormous benefits, errors in medicine are common and patients are frequently harmed. These incidents are serious for patients and a massive and relentless drain on scarce healthcare resources. The Clinical Safety Research Unit (CSRU) was established in Imperial College in September 2002 with an initial grant from Smith and Nephew Foundation. The current programme builds on research developed over 15 years at the Clinical Risk Unit, University College London. The CSRU was established to carry out research on safety in healthcare with the aim of understanding the nature, scale and causes of harm and of making healthcare safer for patients and their families. Our aim is to carry out research directly aimed at enhancing the safety of healthcare and, equally important, providing a training environment for clinicians and researchers.

Patient safety has evolved rapidly in the last few years. There is now a much greater awareness of the scale of error and harm. Conceptual understanding has advanced considerably, but is not yet strongly supported by empirical work. The naive optimism that the problem could be ‘just fixed' is giving way to a more sober assessment of the scale of the challenge of safe healthcare.

We see the following as major challenges for the field in the next five years:

• To gain a deeper understanding of the causes of error and harm and the type of solutions needed to improve safety in healthcare
• To develop an effective suite of interventions and solutions for systematic implementation
• To understand how individuals, teams and organisations erode or create safety
• To develop sufficient research and implementation capacity on core themes to address these issues thoroughly and effectively

We have endeavoured to formulate our own research programme with these broader questions in mind. In particular we address the following key themes:

• Assessing the nature and scale of harm
• Diagnostic error and decision-making
• Teamwork to enhance safety
• The role of design in safer care
• The nature of high reliability in healthcare
• The journey to safety: how organisations become safe
• The patient's role in health quality and safety
• Development of research methodologies to research safety in health care

Each of these themes comprises a defined programme of research which will evolve and mature in the next five years. Our research is currently centred on Surgery and Accident and Emergency but we are exploring themes that are relevant in almost any healthcare setting. We plan to develop collaborative projects in other specialties both in order to explore the generalisability of findings and to maximise their practical impact.