1 Background

We publish quarterly official statistics in development on events recorded to the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service. This quarterly publication is based on patient safety event records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

The LFPSE service defines a patient safety incident as: ‘something unexpected or unintended has happened, or failed to happen, that could have or did lead to patient harm for one or more person(s) receiving healthcare’. Full details of the definitions and harm gradings are available here.

LFPSE also captures three other patient safety event types: outcomes of concern, risks to patient safety, and instances of good care. Throughout this report, with the exception of table 1 and figure 1, we will be using patient safety incidents only, which constitute the vast majority of patient safety events data recorded to LFPSE. Future versions of this publication will encompass other event types.

2 Data quality information

3 Event types

LFPSE brings the feature to record patient safety event types beyond incidents. Recorders can also upload patient safety outcomes, risks, and instances of good care. This is to ensure the database contains more instances of care that the healthcare system can learn from instead of only detailing errors involving patients.

Healthcare organisations have recorded 8.3 million events to LFPSE since the service started operating in 2021. As expected, the number of monthly submissions has been consistent after the the National Reporting Learning Service (NRLS) was officially decommissioned in June 2024. For more information about the transition between national recording systems, please consult the NRLS to LFPSE transition report.

Figure 1: All patient safety events recorded to LFPSE

Based on patient safety events records submitted between July 2021 and June 2026.

The aggregate data displayed below can be downloaded as a CSV file.

LFPSE received 851,162 events between April 2026 and June 2026, the majority of which were recorded as patient safety incidents (96.8%).

Table 1: Number of the event types in LFPSE

Based on patient safety event records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

4 Taxonomy version uptake

The LFPSE taxonomy has been regularly updated since its inception to reflect the nature of the healthcare system better, and to help organisations record patient safety events accurately. The adoption timeline of the latest taxonomy (version 6) is expected to occur at different points across healthcare organisations.

LFPSE-compliant LRMS suppliers and healthcare organisations are currently working towards full adoption of version 6. As illustrated below, the percentage of incidents recorded to LFPSE through the latest taxonomy has been increasing consistently for the past year. Version 6 records constituted 32% of all incidents submitted to LFPSE in June 2026.

Details of taxonomy changes are publicly available through vendor summaries, and a list of compliant vendors can be found here.

Figure 2: All patient safety incidents recorded to LFPSE by taxonomy version

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between July 2021 and June 2026. Incidents originally submitted in one taxonomy version but revised in another version will display as their revised version in this chart if revised within the reporting window.

The aggregate data displayed below can be downloaded as a CSV file.

The data we present below focuses on submissions by NHS trusts and primary care providers. It is possible for organisations to use version 5 and 6 to submit incidents.

Figure 3: Number of recorded patient safety incidents by taxonomy version

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

Note: Other primary care is a category assigned to an organisation by LFPSE and its broad nature requires further validation. We will likely break down this category in the future, after checking organisation codes in this group using NHS England’s Organisation Data Service (ODS).

Table 2: Number of recorded patient safety incidents by taxonomy version

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

5 Recording patterns by physical harm

6 Recording by service area

The LFPSE taxonomy (set of questions and answers) is periodically updated based on data capture needs, analytical value, and user experience. This means there will be some variability between the data captured under different versions. In the plot below, we have grouped some granular categories into broader service groups to account for differences in the recording of service areas between version 5 (used by the majority of LRMS users) and version 6 (used in the online forms):

• ‘Maternity inpatient services’, ‘Maternity community services’ and ‘Maternity services (inpatient or community)’, have been grouped into ‘Maternity Services (inpatient or community)’
• ‘Mental health community services’, ‘Mental health services (inpatient or community)’ and ‘Mental health inpatient services’, have been grouped into ‘Mental Health Services (inpatient or community)’
• ‘GP including out-of-hours services and minor injury units’, ‘GP including out-of-hours services’ and ‘Minor injury unit (MIU) / Urgent treatment centre’, have been grouped into ‘GP including out-of-hours services and minor injury units’
• ‘999 emergency ambulance’, ‘Ambulance and 999’, have been grouped into ‘999 emergency ambulance’
• ‘LD and Autism services’, ‘Learning Disabilities and Autism services’, have been grouped into ‘Learning Disabilities and Autism services’
• ‘Prison healthcare services’, and ‘Prison healthcare’, have been grouped into ‘Prison healthcare services’
• ‘General dental practice (primary care)’, ‘Community dentistry (secondary care)’, and ‘Community dentistry’, have been grouped into ‘Dentistry (general or community)’

The service area variable can contain multiple responses if the incident occurred in more than one area. As a result, some incidents will be counted more than once, so the figures here cannot be totalled without double-counting records. 819,649 incidents recorded a service area this quarter. The majority of these (57.7%) were recorded under acute, general or specialist services. The remaining were spread primarily across mental health, community, and maternity services. A further 4,579 records did not contain a value for service area and are subsequently missing.

Figure 5: Number of incident records by service area

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

The aggregate data displayed below can be downloaded as a CSV file.

7 Recording by involved agents

The purpose of this variable is to help categorise patient safety events at a general level before reporters add more detail. Involved agents is not a field designed to capture granular incident types, as previously done in the NRLS. The categories in this field are a bespoke list of options used to segment records that are most relevant for NHS England’s data sharing partners (e.g., CQC, MHRA). These categories also serve navigational purposes as users will see specialised questions triggered based on the options they record.

Nonetheless, the breakdowns below can provide an insight of common factors involved in patient safety incidents. There were 824,228 incidents in which a response for this field was recorded, the majority being “none of the above”. This large volume of responses is an expected trend based on the design of the LFPSE. Setting these incidents aside, the most common involved agents recorded this quarter were medications, devices, and IT systems or software (figure 6).

Similar to the service area field, users can select multiple responses in the involved agents field. As a result, some incidents will be counted more than once, so the figures here cannot be totalled without double-counting records.

Figure 6: Number of incident records by involved agents

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

The aggregate data displayed below can be downloaded as a CSV file.

8 Medication incidents

For the very first time, we are releasing summary statistics and aggregate data on medication-related patient safety incidents. It is important to reiterate that LFPSE operates as a largely voluntary recording system. The figures in this report reflect the number of incidents recorded by healthcare organisations, not the total number of incidents that occurred across the entire healthcare system. This is particularly relevant for medication incidents because healthcare organisations have other routes available for recording medication-related incidents. Healthcare providers might use alternative recording routes to fulfil different regulatory requirements than those set out by NHS England (e.g., submissions to MHRA via the Yellow Card scheme).

LFPSE received 88,413 medication-related incidents this quarter, equivalent to 10.7% of all incidents recorded. Similar to the adoption trend presented in figure 2, medication incidents were predominantly recorded using version 5 of the taxonomy, totalling 57,463 incidents this quarter (i.e., 65.0% of all medication incident recording). Adoption of version 6 is increasing consistently (figure 2). We received 30,950 incidents recorded in version 6, which comprised 35.0% of medication-related incidents this quarter.

Differences between taxonomy versions, and differing adoption stages of version 6 across healthcare organisations, need to be considered carefully in the analysis of medication incidents. Generally, version 6 provides more specificity and uses the NHS dictionary of medicines and devices (dm+d) to facilitate consistent medication nomenclature. As organisations transition to version 6, we will acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of medication-related incidents recorded to LFPSE.

9 Recording by safety challenges

Similar to involved agents, the safety challenges categories within LFPSE acts as a flag for when records relate to pre-existing large or national programmes of work on common safety issues, in order to help segment data for the relevant teams where necessary. If the event does not relate directly to any of these programmes, users would select “none of the above”. During this quarter, 823,505 incidents recorded a response under safety challenges, the majority being “none of the above”. Barring this category, the most common safety challenges recorded were pressure ulcers, falls, and self harm (figure 10).

Similar to the service area field, users can select multiple responses when recording safety challenges. As a result, some incidents will be counted more than once, so the figures here cannot be totalled without double-counting records. We excluded 723 incidents, as they did not have a response recorded for this field.

Figure 11: Number of incident records by safety challenges

Based on patient safety incidents records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

The aggregate data displayed below can be downloaded as a CSV file.

10 LFPSE uptake rates

LFPSE operates as a largely voluntary recording system and the requirements for healthcare organisations to connect to the service differ based on their contractual arrangements:

• All healthcare organisations operating under the NHS Standard Contract, which includes NHS trusts and independent health sector providers, are obliged to ensure they are able to report patient safety incidents to the LFPSE service.
• Organisations operating under the Standard General Medical Services Contract, which covers most GP practices, are required to register for the LFPSE service, and to maintain a user account with administrator rights. Nonetheless, GP practices can continue to use alternative systems besides LFPSE to record and manage patient safety incidents.
• Under NHS England’s Terms of Services of NHS pharmacists, pharmacies must participate in an approved incident reporting system. Any events that meet the national definition of a patient safety incident should be recorded to the LFPSE service.

Connection to the LFPSE allows healthcare providers to share their data with NHS England and other regulatory bodies. Decisions on which events to record are not mandatory, except where recording a death or instance of severe harm fulfils mandatory notification requirements (e.g. to the CQC). Providers are encouraged to record as much useful information as possible for national learning.

An organisation is able to record to LFPSE once it is connected (i.e., through their LRMS or through the online service). The list of NHS trusts and primary care organisations connected to LFPSE in England, as at the end of this quarter, can be downloaded from this CSV file. This is part of our work to describe and investigate trends in incident recording across the entirety of the NHS. This work is experimental but aims to analyse incident recording from organisations in areas such as NHS primary care and, eventually, independent sector NHS-funded care.

Aggregate figures of connected organisations, as well as uptake rates, are shown in table 4. We currently define LFPSE uptake rates as the percentage of organisations recording incidents to LFPSE, out of the total number of organisations open in England for the respective organisation type. The definition of this measure may be subject to change in future reports.

NHS England received 824,228 patient safety incidents in LFPSE between April 2026 and June 2026 (table 1). Most of these incidents (93.8%) were recorded by NHS trusts, totalling 772,833 incidents during this quarter. During the current period, incidents from primary care comprised 5,761 incidents, or 0.7% of all incidents recorded. Primary care incidents were spread across pharmacy (67.8%), general practitioner (GP) practices (27.9%), primary care networks (PCNs, 3.1%), and other primary care providers (1.2%).

Table 4: Recording into LFPSE by NHS trusts and primary care providers

Based on patient safety incident records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

Notes:

• Total no. of organisations in England figures are based on NHS England’s ODS records of open organisations. We have accounted for organisational changes in the NHS trusts category.
• Uptake rate shows the percentage of total organisations submitting at least one incident in the reporting quarter.
• Other primary care is a category assigned to an organisation by LFPSE and its broad nature requires further validation. We will likely break down this category in the future, after checking organisation codes in this group using ODS. We will provide England-wide figures at that point.

11 Organisation level

This CSV contains the number of patient safety incidents recorded, the median lag for recording these incidents, and recording rates for NHS trusts by region and trust type, as taken from the trust accounts consolidation (TAC) data publications. Different measures of provider activity have been used to standardise recording rates across different sectors. Quarterly bed days data was used for acute, mental health, and specialist trusts; whilst care contacts data was used across community trusts, and ambulance contacts for ambulance trusts. We explain the calculation of recording lag and rates for each Trust type below.

During the current period there were 14,619 incidents where an organisation code was not present and therefore an organisation could not be identified. These incidents represented 1.8% of all incidents recorded this quarter and are not included in this section. There were also 6,180 incidents where the reporting organisation was different to the organisation that the incident actually occurred in, accounting for 0.8% of the incidents reported during this period.

The organisation-level table can be downloaded as a CSV file.

12 Recording lag

Recording lag for patient safety events is measured as the difference in the number of days between the date the patient safety incident occurred and the date that it was recorded to LFPSE. The median lag is then taken to minimise the effect of any outliers (such as events which only become apparent many years after occurring). In the current period there are 64,154 patient safety incidents without an incident occurring date and therefore a lag could not be calculated for these records.

In LFPSE for the current reporting period, the median recording lag was 0 days, with 60.7% of incidents being recorded on the same calendar day that they occurred. The majority of NHS trusts (82.2%) recording to the LFPSE have a median recording lag of 0 days. For the remainder of organisations, median recording lag ranged from 1 to 23 days.

Figure 12: Median recording lag (in days) versus total number of incidents recorded, per NHS trust

Based on patient safety incident records submitted between April 2026 and June 2026.

13 Recording rates

14 Feedback

Your feedback is welcome on the format, frequency and utility of this document, so that we can provide reports that are of most benefit. Please contact patientsafety.analysis@nhs.net with any suggestions.

The analysts with overall responsibility for this report are:

Joshua Mutio
Lead Analyst
Patient Safety, Medical Directorate Programmes
Data & Analytics
NHS England

Juan Sebastian Gonzalez-Martinez
Analyst
Patient Safety, Medical Directorate Programmes
Data & Analytics
NHS England

Hannah Sheldon
Analyst
Patient Safety, Medical Directorate Programmes
Data & Analytics
NHS England

Matthew Webb
Analytical Officer
Patient Safety, Medical Directorate Programmes
Data & Analytics
NHS England