Patient safety: A literature review to inform an evaluation of a maternity service

This literature review summarises the history of patient safety initiatives in health-care systems around the world. The need to improve patient safety is commonly called for following interrogation of data captured as a measure of patient safety including audit, clinical indicator reporting and evaluation methods. Many such reports exist for maternity services. Recommendations for improvement identified after review may be taken up, but there is little in the literature that demonstrates how clinicians consider such recommendations, implement improvement strategies and assess their impact. The authors of this paper concur with other authors who call for more research in this regard.