Patient Safety Incident Response Framework

We strive to provide world class healthcare with outstanding patient outcomes, safety and experience. Healthcare carries some risk and we will work hard to keep this risk as low as possible. Occasionally we may not get it right, and when this happens we need to understand the circumstances and why it happened.

The NHS in England has introduced a new way of looking at patient safety. This is called the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework. It is being introduced across the whole of the NHS in England. UHS has adopted this new way of working.

The framework provides a new direction for patient safety in the NHS with the focus on effective learning and improvement, compassionate engagement and to embed a patient safety culture in the Trust.

What does this mean?

This means that the Trust has a greater flexibility in the investigations over the methods that are used and the time that investigations will take. We will decide which level of investigation is appropriate to the incident based on the complexity of the case and the potential for new learning.

The purpose of our investigations are to understand what happened and the factors that led up to it. This is to enable us to make changes to reduce the risk of it happening again, to someone else.

We will start to use different methods and terms, such as patient safety incident, after action reviews and patient safety investigations. No matter what method we use the aim remains the same to ensure we understand all the factors that contribute to the event and identify methods to reduce the risk of it happening again.

We may take the view that similar cases would be better investigated together, so we will group them together but please be assured that the same time and care will be given to the cases.

You as the patient or the patient’s relatives/representatives, may have a unique view of the event and we believe that the investigation may be improved with your help and contributions. You may be contacted by the investigation team to provide you with updates but to also ask if there are any questions you would like answered by the investigation. We will also share the reports with you.

Our patient safety incident response plan is available here: