Patient Safety Learning’s response to the revised responsibilities for Freedom to Speak Up across the NHS

Summary

The 2025 review of patient safety in England, chaired by Dr Penny Dash, proposed changes intended to coordinate and rationalise patient safety roles and responsibilities. In this long-read article Patient Safety Learning reflects on NHS England’s proposals to implement one of these changes, the abolition of the National Guardian’s Office, which was introduced following Sir Robert Francis‘s 2015 review Freedom to Speak Up.[1]

Content

Last year’s Review of patient safety across the health and care landscape proposed a number of structural changes to the roles of existing national healthcare organisations. Among these was a recommendation to “streamline functions relating to staff voice”, suggesting there could be greater alignment between responsibilities that are currently divided between the National Guardian’s Office and NHS England. It also suggested there should be a greater role for healthcare providers in delivering Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) functions.

The review recommended that:

“Now that guardians have been established across providers, the responsibilities of the National Guardian for Freedom to Speak Up in the NHS and National Guardian’s Office should be incorporated into providers. This means that the distinct role of National Guardian is no longer required.

As part of its wider inspection responsibilities, a core function of CQC should be to assess whether every commissioner and provider has effective Freedom to Speak Up functions, with the right skills and training.”[2]

NHS England have subsequently held a short consultation on proposals for putting these changes into practice.[3] This month they published the outcome, setting out new details for revised responsibilities for FTSU across the NHS.[4] In this article we reflect on these proposals.

Policy and guidance

It appears that while NHS England will seek to incorporate the National Guardian’s Office’s guidance functions into its existing FTSU team, the policy function may largely cease. It states that these changes present an “opportunity to integrate Freedom to Speak Up insights into wider staff experience and patient safety policy development”. Patient Safety Learning believes that in practice this will result in a notable loss of the analysis and research by the National Guardian’s Office from recent years.

NHS England are unlikely to be able to replicate some areas of this work credibly, without being seen as marking their own homework, for example analysing staff survey results.[5] There is also likely to be less capacity to look at how experiences of speaking up can vary amongst different groups of NHS staff. Previous research commissioned by the National Guardian’s Office has, for example, been able to highlight specific issues relating to speaking up and ethnicity and the experience of oversees-trained healthcare workers.[6] [7]

NHS England itself is currently undergoing a reorganisation that will end in its functions being transferred to the Department of Health and Social Care. It is not clear how this may impact FTSU functions in the longer term. Or whether any arrangements will be put in place to ensure that high-level NHS oversight on speaking up policy and driving changes in safety culture is retained. It is plausible we could see a further reduction in national resources and capability in FTSU functions in the near future.

Moving responsibilities to providers

A central focus of these changes is to move more FTSU functions under the remit of individual NHS organisations, aligned with recommendations of Penny Dash’s patient safety review last year. This includes placing greater responsibility on them for ensuring local FTSU guardians are trained and supported. NHS England state that:

“NHS healthcare providers and commissioners will be solely responsible for ensuring their guardians are appropriately trained, including ensuring all new guardians complete the foundation guardian training, which will be available through the e-Learning for Health platform. As part of trust-level Well-led assessments, the CQC will consider how effectively trust leadership ensures that guardians are appropriately trained.”

Evidence indicates that there is wide variability in how the FTSU Guardian role operates across the NHS, being resourced and deployed differently by NHS Trusts.[8] [9] There is prospect of further divergence as more aspects of FTSU functions are delegated to individual organisations as part of these new arrangements.

Increased oversight responsibilities for individual providers and commissioners may create further problems. Such a model may work well where organisations show a strong commitment to ‘speaking up’, but not for those with existing poor practices. As proposed, it appears CQC inspections would be the primary avenue to identify these issues going forwards. Inspections are by their nature infrequent. This may lead to a failure to identify, and respond to, problematic cultures and where there is a lack of support for listening to staff.

We believe the NHS needs oversight arrangements to ensure that protections are in place for staff who want to raise concerns. The removal of the National Guardian’s Office is one less mechanism of independent accountability.

National points of contact

Currently the National Guardian’s Office maintains a central, public registry of FTSU Guardians. As part of NHS England’s proposed changes, this registry will close. Instead, all organisations will be required to list their guardian(s) on their website, with the CQC verifying this through inspections.

This change will clearly simplify processes at a national level. However, it may have the potentially unintended consequence of making it more difficult for NHS staff to find information about their local FTSU Guardian. Given the variable layout and quality of NHS organisation websites, the accessibility of this information could differ significantly from Trust to Trust. We believe it is important that these changes do not increase barriers to staff accessing information about speaking up routes.

We also note that requirements from NHS England to publish information on a providers websites are not always fulfilled. We highlighted an example of this last year, noting that a significant number of Trusts who have not published their Patient Safety Incident Response Plans, contrary to national guidance.[10]

Closure of the public registry will be coupled with a closure of the separate FTSU contact point for enquiries, which currently receives approximately 4,000 enquiries a year, hosted by the National Guardian’s Office. Instead, queries will be re-directed to NHS England’s contact centre and escalated to its FTSU team if required.

With access to the right information and guidance, this transition could be relatively smooth. The NHS England proposals note that most existing queries relate to training, guardian contacts, and data submissions and reporting. 

However, there may be an issue that on sensitive FTSU issues, staff may feel less able or willing to go through this route, as opposed to an enquiry line hosted by a body separate from NHS England. This applies all concerns that are raised, not just patient safety issues, with the majority of FTSU queries focused on staff behaviours (though these may also have implications for patient safety).

With NHS England functions being moved into the Department of Health and Social Care, it is not yet clear how such queries will be addressed and support provided in future years.

Data and insights

Turning to data collection, NHS England states that its objective in making changes in this area is to:

“Improve national data collection so it is more consistent and supports system learning and improvement, reduces administrative burden, and integrates more effectively with existing NHS systems to generate meaningful insights.”

The National Guardian’s Office currently collects quantitative and qualitative FTSU data from all guardians every quarter and publishes the quantitative data. When it has closed, NHS England states that it will continue to collect quantitative data from NHS Trusts and Integrated Care Boards through the NHS national data collection process. However, it will pause national data collection for primary care and independent health providers.

It is hard to envision how ceasing to collect FTSU data in relation to primary care and independent health providers is an improvement on the current arrangements. The proposals note that NHS England will “review” FTSU arrangements for these sectors, with no indication on whether this will re-start. We hope they will re-consider this decision in the long term.

Looking ahead

The National Guardian’s Office and FTSU Guardians were introduced following Sir Robert Francis‘s 2015 review Freedom to Speak Up.[1] Over ten years later many of the problems it highlighted around speaking up and the presence of blame cultures in the NHS continue to persist, presenting barriers to improving patient safety. The existing FTSU structures are seen to have made improvements in some areas, but have not addressed, and would not be able to address solely, the underlying systemic causes of these culture problems.

As the most recent results of the NHS Staff Survey have shown, there has been no significant improvement in responses to questions on reporting, speaking up and acting on patient safety concerns in recent years.[11] These issues form a recurring theme across inquiries into major patient safety scandals. They are also reflected in the shocking experiences and testimonies of whistleblowers, such as those highlighted in our Speaking up for patient safety interview series.[12] It is notable that in this new document outlining changes to FTSU functions, there is no significant mention of the importance of protecting staff (including FTSU Guardians themselves) who raise concerns.

Tackling these problems needs a greater focus, on creating a culture in healthcare that supports raising, discussing and addressing the risks of unsafe care. This needs to happen at both a national and organisational level. As part of this there should be at least the maintenance of support, if not improvement on the current arrangements, for local FTSU Guardians. This includes the ability to coordinate and to develop evaluation and impact frameworks that enable learning and good practice to be shared and consistently implemented.

It remains to be seen if these new arrangements provide this, or if the loss of a separate National Guardian’s Office ultimately has a negative impact on patient safety.

References

1. Robert Francis QC. Freedom to speak up: An independent review into creating an open and honest reporting culture in the NHS. February 2015.
2. Department of Health and Social Care. Review of patient safety across the heath and care landscape. 7 July 2025.
3. NHS England. Future of Freedom to Speak Up: engagement pack. 28 January 2026.
4. NHS England. The future of Freedom to Speak Up. 16 April 2026.
5. National Guardian’s Office. Listening to the silence: What does the Staff Survey tell us about speaking up in the NHS? 24 July 2024.
6. Roger Kline and Ghiyas Somra. Difference Matters: The impact of ethnicity on speaking up. September 2021.
7. National Guardian’s Office. Listening and Learning: Amplifying the voices of overseas-trained workers. May 2025.
8. Aled Jones et al. Implementation of ‘Freedom to Speak Up Guardians’ in NHS acute and mental health trusts in England: the FTSUG mixed-methods study. 1 August 2022.
9. Roger Kline. Patient safety and speaking up—learning from the literature. 11 March 2026.
10. Patient Safety Learning. What do Patient Safety Incident Response Plans tell us about how the NHS is approaching safety investigations? 7 May 2025.
11. Patient Safety Learning. Patient Safety Learning’s response to the NHS Staff Survey Results 2025. 13 March 2026.
12. Patient Safety Learning. Key themes emerging from our ‘Speaking up for patient safety’ interview series. 14 May 2025.