Multiple reporting systems undermine patient safety, says watchdog

A single system to report patient safety concerns would “keep people safer”, a newly appointed NHS watchdog has told HSJ.

Henrietta Hughes – who will take up the post of patient safety commissioner in September – said both clinicians and patients faced a bewildering choice when looking to raise a safety concern, and that there was a need for a “report once” system.

She said that when ”exhausted” clinicians “come to the end of a 12-hour shift, they don’t want to have to do a Datix report and a yellow card report, and if they’ve got a safeguarding concern or a concern about an individual condition, [to have to] send that somewhere else”.

Dr Hughes added: ”Wouldn’t it be better if we had one report that you do, and all the information that comes from that report just gets sent to the appropriate authority? That’s the type of change that I think we’d like to see. I know, as a GP myself, that’s what I would rather do as a professional. But also, I think, for all the organisations, we could get so much more richness of information, we would get more reporting, and we’d keep people safer as a result of it.”

She added that if a patient “wanted to report an individual clinician” they often ended getting bounced around the system, like a pinball. They get sent from pillar to post.”

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Source: HSJ, 8 August 2022