Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the effect of the abolition of the Patient Safety Agency and the transfer of its responsibility for the National Reporting and Learning System to NHS England on the number of patient safety alerts issued between June 2012 and December 2013.

Responsibility for issuing patient safety advice to the healthcare system in the form of patient safety alerts transferred from the National Patient Safety Agency to NHS England in June 2012. Between June 2012 – December 2013 one Patient Safety Alert (NHS/PSA/W/2013/001: ‘Placement devices for nasogastric tube insertion DO NOT replace initial position checks’) was issued on 5 December 2013. To date, all providers have reported this alert as either ‘complete’ or ‘action not required’.

During the period in question NHS England maintained a constant review of patient safety incidents reported to the National Reporting and Learning System involving death and severe harm and, had an urgent patient safety issue needing alerting been identified, an alert would have been issued.