Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how patient safety incidents were reported before the introduction of the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS); and what data he holds on the number of such incidents recorded in (a) each of the five years (i) before and (ii) after the introduction of the NRLS and (b) in each of the last five years.

The National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) has been in operation since 2003 and supports NHS England to fulfil statutory duties relating to the collation of and learning from patient safety incident reports.

NRLS is principally a secondary use service and collects patient safety incident records that are recorded on healthcare providers’ Local Risk Management Systems (LRMS). The primary use of patient safety incident records is by the provider organisation that collects the data on its own LRMS and uses the information to support local safety improvement efforts. NRLS was created to support the national collation of patient safety incident records from LRMS and some of the existing LRMS predate the introduction of the NRLS.

Given its age, NRLS is being replaced with the new Learn From Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service. More information is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/learn-from-patient-safety-events-service/

NRLS, and its replacement LFPSE, support the collation of patient safety incident records from members of the public as well as from LRMS. NRLS does this through the Patient and Public eForm, which is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/report-patient-safety-incident/#public

As part of the development of the LFPSE service, work is underway to determine how best to support the future collection of patient safety incidents information from patients and the public. A report on the first stage of this work, published in October 2023, is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/the-learn-from-patient-safety-events-lfpse-service-patient-and-family-discovery-report/

Information on how patient safety incident records are collated and used by NHS England is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/using-patient-safety-events-data-to-keep-patients-safe/

No data is held on patient safety incident recording prior to the introduction of the NRLS in 2003. Data on the number of patient safety incidents collected by NRLS is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/national-patient-safety-incident-reports/