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.

Patient safety news and alerts

NHS to roll out ‘Martha’s Rule’

The head of the NHS has today announced the rollout of ‘Martha’s Rule’ in hospitals across England from April, enabling patients and families to seek an urgent review if their condition deteriorates. The patient safety initiative is set to be rolled out to at least 100 NHS sites and will give patients and their families […]