NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 3 2024/25 (October to December 2024)

Summary

This update presents statistics from the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service, a national NHS system for the recording and analysis of patient safety events that occur in healthcare. The LFPSE definition of a patient safety incident is 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.

This report shares the patient safety incident data from October to December 2024.

Content

Count of Event Types in LFPSE – based on patient safety event records from October 2024 to December 2024

LFPSE brings the feature to record patient safety event types beyond incidents. Recorders can now also upload patient safety risks, outcomes, 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. In this period, 814,560 events were recorded to LFPSE, the majority of which were recorded as patient safety incidents (96.46%).

Count of patient safety incidents by maximum physical harm – based on patient safety records from October 2024 to December 2024

Grading the degree of harm to a patient resulting from a patient safety incident can be a challenge for recorders, but by grading patient safety incidents according to the harm they cause patients, local organisations can ensure consistency and comparability of data. This consistent approach locally will enable LFPSE to compare, analyse and learn from data nationally. This grading can also be used to “triage” incidents for review both locally and nationally, ensuring the most serious events are looked at first.

LFPSE also allows for grading of the psychological harm associated with the recorded patient safety incidents. This is an experimental field which seeks to explore if responses to safety incidents need to be different if psychological harm is considered separately from physical harm, rather than rolling them together into one measure, as was done in the previous National Reporting Learning Service (NRLS). Currently, NHS England states that there is low confidence in the grading of psychological harm, as users familiarise themselves with its use, and as such, it is excluded from this report.