Organisation patient safety incident reports: 29 September 2021

Data based on incidents that occurred in England from 1 April 2020 to 31 March 2021 and were submitted to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) by 31 May 2021.

October 2022 correction

Issues were identified with submissions to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) for a small number of providers and data was corrected. As a result, the data and commentary document on this page were updated 13 October 2022.

The updated data do not substantially change the distributions of incident reports, nor any interpretation made in the published commentaries. Minor changes in report number for April 2020 – March 2021 have been seen across organisations.

View the correction impact statement for more detail.

OPSIR commentary

The data

Each year we publish official statistics on patient safety incidents reported to the NRLS, presented by NHS provider. This is the first OPSIR publication to use annual timeframes, rather than six-monthly, and the data will now continue to be published annually going forwards.

Official statistic compliance

We produce the organisation patient safety incident report official statistic publications in accordance with the code of practice for statistics. The documents below describe our compliance with the code.

Supporting documents

Supporting information on patient safety incident reporting and the NRLS, what this data is, the methodology, and why we publish it.

How we use incident reports submitted to the NRLS to improve patient safety

You can find details of  how we identify issues and risks by reviewing patient safety incident reports, and the action we take as a direct result to protect patients from harm on our ‘Using patient safety events data to keep patients safe‘ webpages.

The pages include information and case studies on what we’ve done to address ‘rare and under-recognised’ safety issues identified through the NRLS and other sources.

Contact us

If you have any queries in relation to the data contained in the workbooks please contact us.