The National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA) has published organisational patient safety incident reports for each NHS Trust or local health board across England and Wales. These have been designed to be used by boards to compare their reporting profile with similar NHS organisations and set priorities for local action.
Today’s figures show that across England, 92.5% of all patient safety incidents result in low or no harm to the patient. In addition, the figures show that 6.2% of incidents are reported as moderate harm to patients, 0.8% as severe harm to patients and 0.4% as contributing to patient death.
The most commonly reported incident type overall is patient accident (32.8% of reports), followed by treatment/procedure (10.1%) and medication (9.4%).
More Trusts are reporting more often – 98% per cent of trusts across England provided incident reports to the NPSA, which is a three per cent increase compared to the previous period.
Chief executive Martin Fletcher said: “More reports do not mean more risks to patients. Indeed quite the reverse. These data are sound evidence of an improving reporting culture across the NHS. Frontline staff are more likely than ever to raise safety concerns much more openly.
“Only with strong leadership from boards will we succeed to make patient care even safer. These organisational reports will help boards review their local approaches to patient safety. This will help build an even stronger safety culture of reporting and learning to prevent harm to future patients.”
