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

Martha’s Rule rolled out to all acute hospitals

Martha’s Rule is now available in every acute hospital in England, the NHS has announced, as new data shows hundreds of patients have benefitted from potentially life-saving changes to their care thanks to the scheme. Between September 2024 and June 2025, there were 4,906 calls made to Martha’s Rule helplines to escalate concerns about care […]

See all patient safety news