Dr Jonathan Benn

Jonathan Benn is a Lecturer in Quality Improvement in Healthcare at the Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality, Imperial College London.  With a background in Psychology and Human Factors, Jonathan joined the Centre in 2005 to investigate mechanisms for effective feedback from incident reporting systems, based upon systematic review of the health care literature and a scoping study involving a team of safety sciences experts from high risk industries.  Since then he has undertaken research in a number of areas relating to quality and safety at both the clinical and organisational levels.  These include a CLAHRC project focusing upon development and evaluation of a system for continuous monitoring and feedback of quality indicators in anaesthetic care and review of the evidence for different models of data feedback for health care professionals and clinical units.  Since 2007, Jonathan has been involved in a longitudinal, mixed-methods programme of research exploring several research questions relating to the UK Safer Patients Initiative.  Funded by a grant from the Health Foundation, this work investigated methodological issues in studying complex interventions, the process of organisational change at participating sites and the effects upon organisational patient safety climate and capability.

In addition to research, Jonathan is involved in the Centre’s translational work to support continuous quality improvement and related projects in Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, in areas such as Infection Control, Medication Safety, Perioperative care and use of Patient Safety Indicators at the organisational level.  This includes collaboration with local CLAHRC projects, which aim to close the translational gap through implementation of evidenced-based research and innovations into practice.  As a lecturer on the MSc in Quality and Safety in Healthcare, Jonathan teaches on practical quality improvement methodology, statistical process control and qualitative research design, as well as leading a module on the Systems and Organisational aspects of quality and safety.

Other previous work includes a review of the literature on High Reliability Organisations and prior to working in healthcare, a PhD in Human Factors for a project addressing the measurement of human and organisational factors in aerospace systems engineering programmes. 

Research Interests:

• Use of data feedback to individual healthcare professionals and clinical units to improve quality and efficiency of care
• Development of quality indicators to monitor variation in care
• Design and implementation of quality improvement programmes and collaboratives
• Methods for the evaluation of complex and serial interventions
• Reliability and resilience in sociotechnical systems
• Incident reporting systems in health care and high risk industry
• Statistical process control applications in health care