Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many avoidable deaths occurred in NHS hospitals in each year between 2007 and 2017.

This information is not collected centrally. However, in 2017-18, the National Health Service became the first healthcare system to publish estimates by individual trusts of how many of their patients may have died because of problems in their care. Trusts have begun to publish their estimates on a quarterly basis and must include evidence of learning and improvements made to prevent such deaths in their Quality Accounts from June 2018. This new level of transparency is fundamentally about generating learning to ensure the safety of NHS services.