Healthcare Leadership and Patient Safety Training Course

Course overview

Clinical leaders are expected to protect patients while managing staffing pressure, escalating demand, handover failures, competing priorities and scrutiny after incidents. This course equips participants to lead safety as an operational discipline rather than a retrospective compliance activity. It focuses on the decisions leaders make before harm occurs: setting clear safety expectations, recognising weak signals, responding to concerns, using data intelligently and creating conditions in which staff can speak up.

Participants learn to connect leadership behaviours with practical patient-safety methods. They use safety culture assessment findings, process maps, risk registers, safety huddles, escalation pathways and incident-response principles to identify and control risk. The course covers just culture, human factors, psychological safety, TeamSTEPPS communication, the IHI Model for Improvement, PDSA testing and learning-focused incident reviews. Participants practise leading difficult conversations after near misses, prioritising corrective actions and reporting safety performance to senior governance forums.

Teaching combines instructor-led briefings with healthcare case studies, simulated safety huddles, root-cause and systems-analysis workshops, group decision exercises and facilitated peer review. Each participant develops a Patient Safety Leadership Action Plan for a real service, ward, clinic or department. The plan includes a defined safety problem, stakeholder map, baseline measures, escalation arrangements, PDSA test cycle and 90-day implementation milestones. Participants receive a certificate on completion.

The course is designed for experienced clinical, operational and quality leaders who influence frontline care delivery and need to turn patient-safety responsibilities into consistent team practice. It is equally relevant to leaders newly appointed to a safety, governance or service-management remit.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Assess local safety culture findings and identify leadership actions that improve speaking-up and escalation behaviours
• Lead structured safety huddles using risk prompts, escalation criteria and documented follow-up actions
• Apply the IHI Model for Improvement to define an aim statement, measures and PDSA test cycle
• Map a patient-care process to identify failure points, handoff risks and control measures
• Conduct a learning-focused incident review using systems factors, contributory factors and action prioritisation
• Use TeamSTEPPS communication tools to manage handovers, briefings, debriefs and graded assertiveness
• Build a patient-safety dashboard with outcome, process and balancing measures for governance review
• Produce a 90-day Patient Safety Leadership Action Plan for a defined clinical service

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Clinical Directors and Medical Leads — who set safety expectations across services and respond to performance concerns
• Ward Managers and Senior Nurses — who lead daily staffing, handover, escalation and safety-huddle routines
• Allied Health Professional Leads — who coordinate multidisciplinary care pathways and manage service risks
• Quality, Risk and Patient Safety Managers — who support incident learning, assurance reporting and improvement programmes
• Operational and Service Managers — who balance access, capacity and safety controls across patient-facing teams
• Newly Appointed Healthcare Leaders — who need a practical framework for leading safety beyond policy compliance

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have at least two years of experience in a healthcare, clinical support, quality, operational or governance role and some responsibility for influencing care delivery, team performance or service improvement. Familiarity with local incident-reporting processes, risk registers, clinical governance meetings and basic quality-improvement language is helpful. Participants should be able to interpret simple run charts, rates and narrative incident reports. No prior formal qualification in patient safety, Lean, Six Sigma, human factors or root-cause analysis is required. A laptop is useful for working on the action-plan template but is not essential.

Training methodology

The five-day programme uses short instructor-led inputs followed by application to realistic hospital, community and outpatient-care scenarios. Participants analyse incident narratives, map care processes, practise safety-huddle facilitation and use TeamSTEPPS scripts in role-played escalation and handover situations. Small groups examine safety data, distinguish special-cause from common-cause variation, and prioritise actions using impact and feasibility criteria. Facilitated peer challenge is used throughout. The final day is an application-planning workshop in which participants complete and present a 90-day Patient Safety Leadership Action Plan for their own setting.

Course outline

Day 1: Leading a culture of patient safety

• Patient safety as a leadership and operational-management responsibility
• Just culture principles and fair accountability decision-making
• Psychological safety and speaking-up conditions in clinical teams
• Safety culture survey domains and interpreting local findings
• Human factors principles for leaders managing complex care systems
• Safety leadership walkrounds and frontline listening techniques
• Safety huddles, briefings and debriefs as daily management routines

Workshop: Participants facilitate a simulated ward safety huddle and produce a prioritised risk-and-escalation log.

Day 2: Identifying and controlling clinical risk

• Process mapping the patient journey across clinical handoffs
• Failure mode identification at interfaces, transitions and transfers
• Risk matrices, risk appetite and residual-risk statements
• Contributory factors in staffing, equipment, environment and information flow
• High-reliability principles and sensitivity to operations
• Escalation pathways for deteriorating patients and unsafe conditions
• Risk registers with named owners, controls and review dates

Workshop: Participants map a medication, discharge or diagnostic pathway and produce a risk register with proposed controls.

Day 3: Communication, teamwork and safe decisions

• TeamSTEPPS SBAR for structured clinical communication
• Closed-loop communication and check-back techniques
• CUS and two-challenge rule for graded assertiveness
• Structured handover design using I-PASS principles
• Multidisciplinary briefing and contingency planning
• Leading difficult conversations after a near miss or unsafe act
• Decision-making under pressure and cognitive bias safeguards

Workshop: Participants role-play an escalating patient-safety concern and produce a TeamSTEPPS-based communication and handover script.

Day 4: Learning from incidents and measuring improvement

• NHS PSIRF learning response principles and proportionate review selection
• Systems-based incident analysis and contributory-factor mapping
• Family and staff involvement in compassionate incident responses
• Action hierarchy and designing stronger corrective actions
• IHI Model for Improvement aim statements and driver diagrams
• Outcome, process and balancing measures for patient safety
• Run charts, signal interpretation and safety dashboard design

Workshop: Participants analyse a case incident, create a contributory-factor map and draft measures for an improvement dashboard.

Day 5: Embedding safety leadership in the service

• PDSA cycle planning and small-scale change testing
• Stakeholder mapping for clinical, operational and patient partners
• Implementation barriers, readiness assessment and mitigation planning
• Governance reporting for quality committees and executive boards
• Accountability structures, action tracking and benefits realisation
• Sustaining change through audit, feedback and leader standard work
• Ninety-day patient safety leadership action planning

Workshop: Participants complete and peer-review a 90-day Patient Safety Leadership Action Plan with measures, owners, PDSA tests and governance milestones.

Tools & standards covered

AHRQ TeamSTEPPS 3.0, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Model for Improvement, NHS Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), WHO Surgical Safety Checklist

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions