Patient safety

Patient safety is the avoidance of unintended or unexpected harm to people during the provision of health care. We support providers to minimise patient safety incidents and drive improvements in safety and quality. Patients should be treated in a safe environment and protected from avoidable harm.

The NHS patient safety strategy

The NHS Patient Safety Strategy describes how the NHS will continuously improve patient safety, building on the foundations of a safer culture and safer systems.

The strategy sets out how the NHS will support staff and providers to share safety insight and empower people – patients and staff – with the skills, confidence and mechanisms to improve safety. Getting this right could save almost 1,000 extra lives and £100 million in care costs each year.

Our National Patient Safety Team are supporting the NHS to achieve the strategy’s aims through a series of programmes and areas of work. All of this work relates to the strategy’s foundations of ‘patient safety culture’ and ‘patient safety systems’, and the three strategic aims ‘insight’, ‘involvement’ and ‘improvement’. Find out more below.

Latest resources

Patient safety news and alerts

National patient safety alert – harm from incorrect recording of penicillin allergy as penicillamine allergy

A joint National Patient Safety Alert has been issued by the NHS England National Patient Safety team, in collaboration with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Royal College of Physicians and Royal College of General Practitioners, about the risk of harm from inadvertently recording patients’ penicillin allergies as penicillamine allergies in electronic prescribing and medicines administration (EPMA) […]

See all patient safety news