NHS England: Patient safety event data quarterly publication – Quarter 4 2025/26 (January to March 2026)

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 January to March 2026.

Content

Count of Event Types in LFPSE – based on patient safety event records from January to March 2026

LFPSE brings the feature to record patient safety event types beyond incidents. Recorders can 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, 829,300 events were recorded to LFPSE, the majority of which were recorded as patient safety incidents (96.96%).

Count of patient safety incidents by maximum physical harm – based on patient safety incident records from January to March 2026

Sometimes a problem in care can affect more than one patient, or none at all. To capture this, as a new feature of LFPSE, recorders can submit information for multiple patients per incident, meaning there can be multiple degrees of harm per incident. For the following figure and table NHS England have taken the highest harm level per incident. NHS England identified and removed 64,223  incidents where the number of patients affected was unknown. Preliminary analysis suggests that these records likely represent incidents with no patients involved. NHS England will continue further data quality checks to validate these figures. During this quarter, 739,846 incidents had recorded a degree of harm. The majority of these incidents (94.2%) recorded low or no physical harm to patients.

LFPSE has a new variable 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 National Reporting Learning Service (NRLS). Currently, 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.

Related reading – previous quarterly data publications

• NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 3 2025/26 (October to December 2025)
• NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 2 2025/26 (July to September 2025)
• NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 1 2025/26 (April to June 2025)
• NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 4 2024/25 (January to March 2025)
• NHS England: Patient Safety Event Data Quarterly Publication – Quarter 3 2024/25 (October to December 2024)