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 – risk of oxytocin overdose during labour and childbirth

This National Patient Safety Alert has been issued by the NHS England National Patient Safety team, endorsed by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Royal College of Midwives and Royal College of Anaesthetists, instructing all relevant NHS funded maternity care providers to cease pre-preparing oxytocin infusions at ward level in all clinical areas. All […]

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