Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many prescription errors were recorded by NHS trusts in 2023; and how many were recorded as causing patient harm.

The information is not available in the format requested. This is because the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) is a largely voluntary system, and during 2023 some National Health Service trusts transitioned to the NRLS’s successor, the Learn from Patient Safety Events service.

In the NRLS, the number of actual or potential errors reported as occurring in 2023 at the prescribing stage of the medication process by NHS trusts was 34,388. Of these, 28,926 incidents were graded as no harm, 4,951 were graded as low harm, 463 were graded as moderate harm, 27 were graded as severe harm, and 21 were graded as deaths.