Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure NHS mental health trusts are putting into practice lessons learned from patient homicides.

Under the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, mental health-related homicides are required to be referred to the NHS England Regional Independent Investigation Team for consideration for an independent or locally-led patient safety incident investigation, to understand what happened and how. Organisations are then expected to respond to incidents through a patient safety incident response plan in a way that maximises learning and improvement.

Following the publication of the Care Quality Commission’s review of the Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust under section 48 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 in March and August 2024, NHS England accepted all of the review’s recommendations and is working with providers to implement them. The Department expects that the review’s findings and recommendations will be considered and applied throughout the country with regular progress updates from NHS England.

As part of this work, NHS England has published national guidance around providing intensive support to people with a serious mental illness and has tasked every mental health provider in England to review the policies and practices in place. NHS England will also develop guidance on what good quality and safe care looks like for community mental health services and share best practice. This will include a review of public and patient safety and the fundamentals of good quality care, such as care coordination, patient and family engagement, risk and safety management, treatment, and effective discharge.

In addition, the forthcoming Mental Health Bill will modernise mental health legislation to make it fit for the 21^st Century.