Platform 6: improving safety and quality of care
10 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes.
Platform 6 is about the system rather than the patient in front of you. Something went wrong, or nearly did, and the question is what a nurse does so that it does not happen to the next person.
What this section asks about
- Risk assessment in a range of care settings
- Reporting incidents and near misses, and the duty of candour that goes with them
- Audit, improvement methodology and how quality is measured
- Health and safety law, including manual handling, sharps and hazardous substances
- Infection prevention as a governance question, not only a technique
- Managing risk without removing a person’s independence
Where the marks go
10 marks of the 100 in Part B, which runs for 150 minutes. The NMC splits this section across the levels of Bloom's taxonomy:
- Remember and understand: 4
- Apply and analyse: 3
- Evaluate and create: 3
Where candidates lose marks
- Treating a near miss as nothing to report. A near miss is the cheapest information a system ever gets.
- Reaching for restriction. Managing risk means weighing safety against dignity and independence, with the person.
- Blaming an individual where the question is describing a system failure.
Questions people ask
- Should a near miss be reported if nobody was harmed?
- Yes. It shows where the system nearly failed, which is the point of reporting, and the professional duty of candour applies to what could have caused harm as well as what did.
- Is the duty of candour a legal duty or a professional one?
- Both. There is a professional duty in the Code and a statutory duty on organisations under the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
Practise this section
Practice is filtered by section, so you can work on this one on its own. Every account gets 10 new questions a day without a card.