Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what estimate they have made of the number of (1) patient safety incidents, and (2) duty of candour events, that have occurred in relation to homecare medicines services in each of the past five years.

NHS England cannot provide relevant information to these questions without creation of new data and analysis derived from manual clinical review or other processes. Arrangements for future reporting are being worked on and NHS England is undertaking a piece of work to understand the issues in homecare, so as to inform future improvement actions. A project by the National Homecare Medicines Committee to review the national Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) set is already underway with consultation due later this summer and final documents expected for approval in December 2023. Publication of performance against the KPIs is part of this project.

To monitor industry trends, the home care providers association, the National Clinical Homecare Association, aggregates all providers’ KPIs and they have provided written evidence to the House of Lords Public Services Committee as part of their current investigation into the Homecare Medicines service which has been published. This includes data on patient safety incidents and duty of candour reports, of which a copy is attached.