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 reduce the number of deaths in hospital.

The Government is prioritising patient safety and a learning culture in the National Health Service to prevent harmful events from happening to patients. The NHS Patient Safety Strategy, originally published in 2019, and updated in 2021 and 2023, includes key programmes to support the NHS to improve patient safety continuously and reduce patient harm. Further information on the NHS Patient Safety Strategy is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/the-nhs-patient-safety-strategy/

As part of this, the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework reforms the way providers respond to patient safety incidents, with further information available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/patient-safety-insight/incident-response-framework/engaging-and-involving-patients-families-and-staff-following-a-patient-safety-incident/

In addition, the Learn From Patient Safety Events service also enables the NHS to learn from more than three million patient safety incidents reported annually, including through the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence tools for analysis. Further information on the Learn From Patient Safety Events service is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/patient-safety-insight/learning-from-patient-safety-events/learn-from-patient-safety-events-service/

Other examples of key patient safety initiatives include rollout of Martha’s Rule, with further information available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/marthas-rule/

From September 2024 to July 2025, this policy has resulted in changes in treatment for roughly 1,000 patients, with more than 260 patients requiring transfers of care to high dependency or intensive care units, enhanced levels of care, or a tertiary centre. The Government also introduced the statutory medical examiner system from September 2024 which means that medical examiners independently scrutinise every death in England and Wales not referred to a coroner. This is estimated as more than half a million deaths in 12 months. Medical examiners support local learning and improvement by detecting and referring concerns through established local clinical governance processes.