Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many and what proportion of NHS staff have signed up to the five NHS Sign up to Safety pledges.

To date 236 organisations from across the National Health Service in England have signed up to the campaign and made their five pledges on behalf of all of their members of staff. This includes 86% of acute, 68% of community and 54% of mental health providers and 50% of ambulance trusts plus a range of other health related organisations at frontline regional and national level*.

Individuals everywhere are also able to sign up to the campaign and make their own pledges online. Currently we have around 250 individuals who have done this so far from a wide variety of organisation types. The campaign has focused in its first year on engaging organisations and in its second year will focus on individual involvement.

Organisations who have joined the Sign up to Safety community commit to turning their five pledges into a personalised Safety Improvement Plan. These plans are derived from working with their staff on what matters to them and sets out their ambition and focus for the next three years for how their staff will take action to support the NHS shared goal of halving avoidable harm and saving lives.

*Percentage figures derive from publicly available numbers from 2013, accessible on the NHS Confederation’s website.