Training a clinical safety officer is not the same as having a working clinical safety function, says Dean Mawson in Digital Health.
Too often, a clinician is trained as a CSO, given the title alongside their existing workload, and expected to get on with it.
Meanwhile, technologies are becoming more complex, AI is accelerating deployment, and CSOs are being asked to make increasingly consequential safety decisions, sometimes without the time, support, or authority to do the job properly.
In his latest article for Digital Health, Dean argues that we need to move beyond compliance on paper and build clinical safety into the way organisations operate in reality.
He sets out three areas for change:
- A tiered national competency framework for CSOs
- Formal professional recognition
- Independent external audits of clinical risk management.
