Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that NHS staff are encouraged to report errors and near misses.

From 1 April 2010 it became mandatory for National Health Service organisations in England to report all serious patient safety incidents to the Care Quality Commission as part of the Care Quality Commission registration process.

Alongside this requirement, healthcare organisations, patients and the public are able to report patient safety incidents to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS). The NRLS encourages consistent, high reporting, which provides organisations with more opportunities to learn from incidents and improve safety. To avoid duplication of reporting, the NRLS reports all incidents resulting in death or severe harm to the Care Quality Commission.

Year on year the number of incidents reported to the NRLS increases and open and honest reporting of patient safety incidents is a fundamental pillar of a good patient safety culture. The NHS Outcomes Framework therefore identifies the culture of safety reporting as an ‘improvement area’ and the Care Quality Commission uses low reporting rates of incidents as a potential concern.

The NHS is working to increase reporting from areas of healthcare that have previously had low levels of reporting to the NRLS, such as general practice. In February 2015 a new e-form was launched, specifically designed to make it quick and easy for general practice staff to report patient safety incidents to the NRLS.