Scoring rubric for the NHS Education for Scotland / NHS England Learning Response Review and Improvement Tool – Guide for evaluators

Summary

New guidance and supporting scoring rubric for anyone using the Learning Response Review and Improvement Tool (LRRIT) as part of PSIRF or other approaches for learning from patient safety incidents.

The scoring rubric provides evidence level discriminators and evidence indicators to assist with more explicit and consistent review of learning response reports.

Free to download from NHS Education for Scotland.

Content

Purpose of the scoring rubric

The Learning Response Review and Improvement Tool (LRRIT) is increasingly being used to support the review of Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) learning response reports (NHS England) and other safety learning approaches across the UK home countries and internationally. However, in its original form, LRRIT requires evaluators not only to exercise judgement about the quality of a learning response, but also to interpret what individual LRRIT questions and evidence levels are asking of them.

This interpretative step can introduce unnecessary variation, with different evaluators applying their professional judgement to subtly different understandings of the same criteria. This scoring rubric was developed to address that interpretative ambiguity. It provides explicit, shared criteria that clarify what is being evaluated, allowing professional judgement to be applied to the same reference points across evaluators.

The rubric therefore:

1. Does not remove the need for professional judgement.
2. Does not prescribe a single “correct” score.
3. Helps align evaluators’ judgements around common criteria and distinctions.

The intent is to support more consistent, transparent, and discussable evaluations, while preserving the central role of evaluator expertise.

What the rubric is (and is not)

The rubric is:

• A decision aid, not a checklist.
• A way of supporting calibration across evaluators.
• An analytic tool for identifying and transparently reporting strengths and limitations in a learning response report.

The rubric is not:

• A test with a single correct answer.
• A measure of writing quality alone.
• A requirement that every criterion must be met perfectly. Evaluators are expected to use professional judgement, supported by the descriptors.