NHS England: The National Patient Safety Committee

Summary

This is an overview of the role and responsibilities of the National Patient Safety Committee. This was established in 2021 to bring key national healthcare organisations together to address complex patient safety issues that require cross-organisation effort and input to make care safer within the NHS.

Content

The National Patient Safety Committee is intended to play strategic role in considering the existing landscape of national patient safety planning, response and improvement and consistently share insight and thinking about how, as a national healthcare system, there can be improvements made to effectiveness of these patient safety functions. It is accountable to the National Quality Board.

The Committee will make strategic decisions on how issues for which there is no existing system or approach, or inconsistent systems, should be operationally managed. This may include:

• where identified national patient safety risks or national patient safety issues do not appear to fit within the existing remit of an Arm’s Length Body (ALB) or other national body or;
• where there may be a need to have a coordinated approach across multiple ALBs due to the complex nature of the national patient safety issue.

Scope

The committee’s main focus is on the most significant patient safety challenges in terms of scale of harm and where issues benefit most from national organisations working together with a coordinated approach. Alongside this it may have workstreams related to specific safety processes needing an aligned approach. It currently has three such workstreams:

• overseeing a pilot of oversight of delivery of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch recommendations
• a nationally agreed operational process to improve cross-national organisation working for urgent special patient safety circumstances and to review its operation
• overseeing the accreditation of organisations issuing national patient safety alerts and ensuring alerts meet the required common standards for effectiveness (this function has been taken over from the now disbanded National Patient Safety Alerting Committee).

Core membership

• Academy of Medical Royal Colleges
• Allied Health Professionals
• Care Quality Commission
• Chief Medical Office
• Chief Pharmaceutical Officer
• Department of Health and Social Care
• Emergency Preparedness, Resilience and Response
• Health Education England
• Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency
• National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
• NHS England and NHS Improvement: Patient Safety
• NHS England and NHS Improvement: Estates and Facilities
• NHS England and NHS Improvement: Nursing
• NHS Digital
• NHSX
• UK Health Security Agency

Terms of reference

You can find the full terms of reference for the Committee here.