NHS: Negligence

(asked on 21st October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of medication errors in the NHS in the last year; and what steps his Department is taking to prevent those errors.


Answered by
Nadine Dorries Portrait
Nadine Dorries
This question was answered on 3rd November 2020

There were 223,106 medication incidents reported to the National Reporting and Learning System as occurring between 1 October 2018 to 30 September 2019 in England.

The Medication Safety Improvement Programme which is considering all aspects of medication use and developing new metrics to improve safety; and the Medication Safety Officer Network and Medical Safety Officer Forum, which facilitate communications to enable learning from medication errors, are aimed at improving medication safety. In addition, outcomes for people who suffer adverse drug reactions are tracked by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority’s yellow card scheme, which collects and monitors information on safety concerns involving medicines, to feed into ongoing safety evaluation of medicines.

Outcomes for people who are involved in medication patient safety incidents can be reported to the National Reporting and Learning System. These reports are used to support improvements in patient safety by enabling the National Health Service to understand and learn from such incidents.

The Medicines Safety Improvement Board continues to work to deliver the recommendations of the Short Life Working Group (SLWG), which advised on how to improve safety in the use of medicines. A review of the progress against the recommendations of the SLWG is being conducted on behalf of the National Director of Patient Safety and is expected to report to the Medicines Safety Improvement Board in December.

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