Consultant acute physician Calum McGregor is just back from a trip to Denmark where he picked up an international award on behalf of NHS Lanarkshire.

Calum and colleagues took top spot in the International Prize in Resilient Health Care for 2016, run by the Australian Institute of Health Innovation and the Resilient Health Care Net.

They won first prize thanks to a new patient safety initiative at Wishaw General, known as “Save of the Month”.

Calum explained: “Our acute medical unit admits unselected medical patients from the emergency department and general practice.

“Our ward is a pilot site for NHS Lanarkshire’s patient safety programme, with the aim of reducing the cardiac arrest rate by focusing on clinical observations, recognition of deteriorating patients and responding to deterioration.

“We are interested in developing ‘resilience engineering’ – establishing why things go well and how we can make them more reliable in the future.

“We’ve developed the concept of multi-disciplinary learning from what went well. We call it, ‘Save of the Month’.

“This involves identifying a real patient’s journey where processes of care have been performed very well, and then displaying the anonymous story in our staff room.

“We then review the case with the multi-disciplinary team.

“It’s at an early stage, and the format is being refined as we learn. Following the adoption of ‘Save of the Month’ we have seen improved reliability of clinical observations and more reliable recognition of deterioration.”

The award application – Applying Resilience Engineering to Traditional Morbidity Mortality Meetings – was put forward by Calum and colleagues Julie Coyle, Lesley McGoldrick, Jonathon O’Reilly and Sanjiv Chohan.

Calum travelled to the Resilient Health Care Net meeting in Middlefart, Denmark, to accept the award.

Jeffrey Braithwaite, founding director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, said: “This was a very competitive event and being placed in the top three was a marked achievement.”