Parents as partners - Improving paediatric safety in general practice

Today, we’re speaking to Dr Tom Purchase, a GP and Health and Care Research Wales NIHR doctoral fellow.

Title of paper: Co-generating ideas for safer paediatric care in general practice with parents and stakeholders

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0690

Research has highlighted the important role parents play in in paediatric patient safety, for example, through mitigating safety incidents in general practice, yet their perspectives have rarely shaped system-level improvements. This study co-generated and prioritised ideas for change with parents and key stakeholders, identifying feasible and impactful strategies to improve paediatric safety in primary care. These strategies centred around practice communication, accessing care records and results, and fostering a culture of shared learning and development. Parents are willing and able to contribute meaningfully to safety improvement efforts, and their insights align with national patient safety priorities. Clinicians and policy makers can use these findings to strengthen collaboration with families, tailor safety interventions to local needs, and embed parent voices into the design of safer care systems.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:00:49.500

Hello and welcome today to BJGP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate editors of the Journal. Thanks for listening again to this podcast.

In today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Tom Purchase. Tom is a GP and a health and Care Research Wales NIHR Doctoral Fellow.

We're here today to talk about the paper he's just published in the bjgp and the paper is titled Co Generating Ideas for Safer Pediatric Care in General Practice with Parents and Stakeholders.

So, hi, Tom, it's really great to meet you and to talk about your work, but before we talk about the study itself, I'm interested to know what first got you interested in pediatric patient safety in general practice.

Speaker B

00:00:50.060 - 00:02:26.850

Thanks. It's born, I think, out of an extension of the work that we've been doing within the patient safety team within Cardiff University.

So a lot of what we do is looking at incident reports, safety incident reports, and trying to pick out what are the, you know, high level key learning points and takeaway messages from those.

And then within the team, we started to think about, as well as the types of incidents and the types of harms that are occurring within pediatric incidents. For example, how are parents involved?

And it was a bit of a novel approach to what we normally do, trying to have that extra aspect within the incidents and figuring out how parents were either helping to contribute or to mitigate against the incidents, not just looking at the incidents themselves. So that was the starting point, really.

And then once we'd started digging into that data and identifying that, actually the majority of the time, which is in one of the papers that was published last year in BJGP, 77% of the reports we were looking at specifically around general practice showed that parents were taking these mitigatory actions that, you know, positive actions that were able to prevent harm or further harm from occurring to their child, for example, chasing results or chasing referrals or importantly, being able to speak up. And then that highlighted, I think, the importance of parents being able to have a voice and advocating on behalf of their child.

And that really sparked, I think, the interest, and therefore this part of the.

Speaker A

00:02:26.850 - 00:02:46.490

Project, and I think that's a really interesting thing about this paper, is that it focuses on parents and parents not just as observers of care, but as active contributors to safety. And I wonder what your thoughts are about why that's an important shift in how we think about these things.

I think you've touched on it a bit, but yeah, I'm interested to know a bit more about that.

Speaker B

00:02:46.810 - 00:03:55.980

I think it is a really important aspect of care, but also particularly safety, which maybe is untapped in terms of parents as a resource as to how we can keep children safe.

We know that children on the whole are more, maybe not more vulnerable, but certainly are a vulnerable group when it comes to patient care in general and patient safety.

And that's because they're so heavily reliant on others to speak on their behalf, to make sure somebody else is looking out for their healthcare needs. And therefore they are probably playing a part within the world of patient safety.

And there are good studies from hospital relating to incident reports that show that parents are capable of picking up issues early on. They're able to detect issues that maybe other parts or people within the system aren't detecting.

And as I mentioned, our paper from last year specifically looking at general practice showed that parents are able to prevent harms from reaching their children. So they're playing a substantial part already.

And from a systems perspective, that is mainly parents figuring out workarounds within a system that really isn't, I don't think, designed to support them as well as it could be.

Speaker A

00:03:56.460 - 00:04:33.810

And I guess that's kind of the crux of what you were doing here.

So I guess before we get into findings, just, you know, a quick word about the methods because you worked