Safety leaders ‘battling challenging political narrative’

NHS England’s patient safety chief has said the service is having to “battle against a narrative” that it has not improved safety.

Aidan Fowler, NHSE’s national director for patient safety, told HSJ’s Patient Safety Congress in Telford today that the narrative, which he described as “really challenging”, “sometimes says we haven’t made progress on patient safety when we know we have”.

He said ministers had “understandably” wanted to suggest “everything that happened [during] the last government was terrible, and that includes some of the work that people here have done”.

Dr Fowler said there “has been progress”, but this meant they “have to keep restating that, making the argument again”, which could “feel like quite hard work”.

The NHS Patient Safety Strategy was launched in 2019, and the new NHS quality strategy published this summer suggested it would need another refresh in the near future.

Dr Fowler admitted that some of this work, which has included changing the way the NHS responds to incidents through the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, “is not very sexy”, so people have not heard about it.

He added: “I get that if you try and explain to all our patients what PSIRF is, they’re going to struggle with [it], I understand that.

“But I think that stuff has been foundational and important. We’ve created some bits of work that I think are really important, and we have made a difference.”

The national director also stressed there was “of course much more to do”, and that improvement was a “continuous process”.

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Source: HSJ, 28 September 2026