Practices urged to record patient safety incidents in national systems

GP practices are being asked to sign up to national systems that allow them to record patient incidents in a bid to improve patient safety within primary care.

NHS England has proposed a number of measures to promote a safety culture as well as provide more data and insight into incidents as part of its first primary care patient safety strategy launched at the end of September.

It has warned that incident recording systems in primary care are not as well developed as in secondary care, therefore the 20,000 to 30,000 ‘incidents of avoidable significant harm identified in general practice in England per year’ may be an underrepresentation.

And it has highlighted that a single ‘significant harm episode in primary care’ is estimated to cost the NHS £5,000, a total of more than a £100m a year.

The commissioner is urging practices and other GP organisations to connect to national systems of patient safety information, including the Learn from Patient Safety Events service (LFPSE) or Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) for recording and analysing incidents.

This will "enable learning that supports local and national patient safety improvement", it said. And it helps nurture a culture that focuses on "the role of systems, not individuals, when things go wrong".

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Source: Management in Practice, 11 October 2024