The concept of a regular patient safety briefing is supported by the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and the national Sign Up To Safety campaign, which has a mission to improve patient safety in the NHS and make it the safest healthcare system in the world.

Schedule a regular whole-team patient safety briefing, and bear the following steps in mind.

• 1. Have an agenda, which everyone knows about ahead of time.
• 2. Keep to time and keep discussions focused on patient safety.
• 3. Start with good news, something the pharmacy or a team member has done well, or feedback you have received, then move onto process improvement or reviewing a recent incident.
• 4. When reviewing a near miss or dispensing error, you may find it helpful to use the ‘5 whys’ tool (see mindtools.com) to get to the root cause.
• 5. Discuss what action can be taken to prevent a similar incident happening again.
• 6. Ensure everyone is committed to the action that needs to be taken, making sure you have agreement.
• 7. Ensure that responsibilities for action are clear, with an appropriate timescale and a review point.

Allocate additional time for questions or concerns that can be discussed. You may not have anticipated those subjects when you drafted your agenda. Additional time also allows team members to feel involved and therefore more committed to any actions agreed.