Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that concerns raised by NHS whistleblowers on patient safety are (a) recorded, (b) escalated and (c) reviewed.

There are a number of avenues through which healthcare workers can speak up and raise concerns, with established procedures in place to record, act on, and escalate issues as needed.

In England, more than 1,300 Freedom to Speak Up Guardians now support staff in speaking up. Their role involves working alongside governance, risk, and safety teams to ensure that speaking up translates into improvements in patient care, as well as identifying patterns and trends, for example, in patient safety incidents. Freedom to Speak Up Guardians collect and report anonymised data on the issues raised with them, including patient safety. This data is published by the National Guardian’s Office at the following link:

https://nationalguardian.org.uk/learning-resources/speaking-up-data/

The National Guardian’s Office and NHS England are ‘prescribed persons’, authorised to receive protected disclosures, including those in relation to safety and quality concerns. They are legally required to publish annual reports on protected disclosures and their outcomes.

Every National Health Service organisation in England should be following the national Freedom to Speak Up policy, which outlines minimum standards for handling and addressing concerns. This policy ensures that all reported concerns are considered carefully and investigated objectively when necessary.