Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the effectiveness of current mechanisms for identifying and responding to recurring patient safety failures across NHS trusts.

The Government is committed to improving patient safety across the National Health Service and ensuring that the system identifies, responds to and learns from recurring safety failures. NHS trusts are subject to a range of regulatory and contractual requirements to identify patterns of harm, manage risks and take action to improve services.

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, which became a contractual requirement for all NHS trusts from 1 April 2024, has reformed how organisations respond to patient safety incidents. It supports a more proportionate, transparent and compassionate approach, focused on understanding how incidents happen, identifying local risks and priorities, and ensuring learning leads to improvement.

The Learn from Patient Safety Events service collects and analyses information on patient safety incidents across the NHS, with NHS England continuingly reviewing incidents to identify emerging or under-recognised risks. Where appropriate, these risks can be acted on through National Patient Safety Alerts, national guidance or work with partner organisations, such as the Care Quality Commission.