Avoiding ‘Second Victims’ in healthcare

How do we best support staff in coping with patient safety incidents?

15^th April 2025, 20:00 to 21:00 BST

Overview

Being involved in harming or almost harming a patient can be deeply distressing for healthcare professionals, who typically enter healthcare to help others and ‘first do no harm’. Inadequate organisational support, a harsh blame culture and litigation fears compound this human distress: staff can become the ‘Second Victims’ of patient safety incidents. Between 45% and 91% of healthcare professionals in recent surveys have experienced this ‘Second Victim’ phenomenon during their careers. Acknowledgement and support for patient safety incidents are lacking in healthcare organisations. This webinar examines the ‘Second Victim’ phenomenon and how to support adaptive recovery after a patient safety incident.

Aims

To describe what the 'Second Victim' phenomenon is in healthcare.
To raise awareness of 'Second Victim' phenomenon.
To present some of the academic work done with regards to the second victim phenomenon.
To signpost support available for staff who are 'Second Victims'.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this webinar, attendees should be able to:

Understand what constitutes the 'Second Victim' experience.
Recognise when you are affected.
Recognise when colleagues are affected.
Know where to look for further help and guidance.

Panellists

Our panellists include:

Majid Rashid – ST7 General Surgery Trainee and Member of the Trainees Committee and lead for Wellbeing Series 2025
Dr Lizzie Sweeting – GP and Programme Lead at the Improvement Academy, Bradford Institute for Health Research.
Dr Ruth Simms-Ellis – Psychologist and Principal Researcher at The Yorkshire Quality & Safety Research Group, Bradford Institute for Health Research; Visiting Academic at the School of Psychology, University of Leeds.
Emma Howie - Emma sits on the Trainee Committee, is General Surgery trainee and clinical research fellow within the Surgical Sabermetrics group at the Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh.

CPD

1 Hour

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Recording

A recording of the webinar will be made available on this page in the days following the live broadcast.