“We reduced sexual safety incidents with better reporting systems and talking to patients about sex”

“When you make reporting clearer, you get an increase in reported incidents because people understand what they are reporting,” says Sally Ashton, a nurse who leads on sexual safety at Gloucestershire Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust, a mental health and physical care provider. The trust introduced a sexual safety policy in January 2022 and changed the way that sexual safety incidents were reported so that staff understood what to report and what incidents were happening on wards.“If you didn’t have that context you might think, ‘Oh, incidents are going up—that’s not good.’ But actually it’s because people understand what they are reporting and the need to report it,” she says.Ashton is a member of the Sexual Safety Collaborative,1 a programme of work commissioned by NHS England to improve sexual safety in mental health trusts in England. The collaborative discovered that one way of managing sexual safety incidents in the…
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