Background Parents play a vital role in protecting their children from healthcare-associated harms, for example through mitigating safety incidents in general practice. Despite international calls encouraging family involvement in patient safety initiatives, parental perspectives are rarely embedded in the co-design of safety improvements. Aim To co-generate and prioritise ideas for improving paediatric safety in general practice with parents and key stakeholders, and to explore areas of agreement and disagreement between these groups. Design&setting A multi-method study combined qualitative methodology with quality improvement tools involving four parent workshops and one stakeholder workshop. Parents had experience of accessing general practice services with their children, and stakeholders included clinicians, managers, policy makers, primary care leaders and patient advocates. Method Parents(n=33) reviewed national-level safety incident data and used nominal group technique to generate ideas for change. Ideas were collated, refined and presented to key stakeholders(n=7), who assessed the potential doability and impact of each idea. Results Parents generated 16 ideas for change targeting communication, access to care records and results, and shared learning and development. Stakeholders prioritised seven ideas, including flexible appointments, a designated parent advocate and a campaign to support parents to speak up. Parents and stakeholders most strongly agreed on the need to proactively seek parent feedback and solutions. Conclusion Parents are willing and able to support healthcare teams with their patient safety efforts. Their ideas align with national priorities and offer actionable strategies for general practice teams to adopt or adapt to tailor safer paediatric care to their own populations.
Purchase et al. (Wed,) studied this question.