Part 2 sets out the Digital Clinical Safety Strategy. It directly links to the NHS Patient Safety Strategy, mirroring its structure, which highlights ‘Insight, Involvement and Improvement’, as three strategic priorities for safer systems and safer cultures. Actions are outlined for each of these three areas. The strategy specifies 23 actions, which can be summarised as five national commitments.

National commitments for digital clinical safety

1. Collect information about digital clinical safety, including from the Learn from patient safety events (LFPSE) service and use it to improve system-wide learning.
2. Develop new digital clinical safety training materials and expand access to training across the health and care workforce.
3. Create a centralised source of digital clinical safety information, including optimised standards, guidelines and best practice blueprints.
4. Accelerate the adoption of digital technologies to record and track implanted medical devices through the Medical Devices Safety Programme.
5. Generate evidence for how digital technologies can be best applied to patient safety challenges.

Part 3 explains how this strategy will be delivered and updated, with a focus on patient safety and digital health networks.

This strategy establishes what is needed for digital technologies to enable safety across health and care and how that can be prioritised nationally and delivered with a range of stakeholders. This strategy’s objectives support the wider NHS Patient Safety Strategy’s aim to build safer systems and safer cultures.

Patient Safety Learning's response to the draft:

“The standard mentions safety up front as a fundamental principle which is good, but there are areas that still need addressing. For example, the need for user testing is implied, but not explicit; where a DHT provides any sort of personalised advice or output, it must gather sufficient context about the user to do this safely and the use of appropriately expert clinicians in the development of the DHT (including those who have worked on ML algorithms) should be tightened up. 

There are also issues around data that ought to be addressed. Such as the user being able to see (if they have consented appropriately) who their data has been shared with and when; users should be able to change their mind about this when they want to and easily stop their data being shared; and should the DHT vendor no longer support the DHT, they should offer to give the user their data back and wipe it from their servers, or just say it will be deleted.”

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