Found: receptive to raising concerns and start abusing their position when someone raises concerns on patients

Found: unsafe” (HCA/Support Worker, South East England) “Management do not care about you as staff or the patients

Found: Trust1. 2.The report made a series of recommendations on increasing support for staff to raise patients

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that hospitals follow NICE guidelines on (a) suicide and (b) self-harm risk assessment (i) tools and (ii) scales.

Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)

Improving risk management and safety planning for suicide and self-harm prevention is a priority in the Government’s suicide prevention strategy. The strategy highlights the importance of compliance with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) guidelines on risk assessment. NHS England is taking forward work in this area.

We would expect health professionals to have regard to guidelines from the NICE, which state that risk assessment tools should not be used to predict future suicide or repetition of self-harm.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government whether the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework has been fully implemented throughout the NHS to support learning and compassionate responses to families following any incidents.

Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

Compliance with the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) is now a contractual requirement for all services commissioned under the NHS Standard Contract. Implementing the PSIRF is an ongoing process and organisations’ approach to patient safety incident response can and should evolve over time. Work is also underway to explore implementation of the PSIRF in wider services within the National Health Service, such as primary care.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many never events occurred in each NHS Trust in each year since 2019.

Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)

Information on Never Events is published by NHS England. All available data on Never Events, including a breakdown for individual National Health Service trusts, is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/never-events-data/

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of NHS speak up guardians in (a) primary and (b) secondary care settings.

Answered by Andrew Stephenson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)

Freedom to Speak Up Guardians are a valued channel through which concerns can be raised, and have handled over 100,000 cases since the National Guardian’s Office first started collecting data in 2017. This represents over 100,000 opportunities for learning and improvement. In 2022/23 alone over 25,000 cases were raised with Freedom to Speak Up Guardians and over four-fifths, or 82.2% of those who gave feedback to their Freedom to Speak Up Guardian, said they would speak up again.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many never events occurred within NHS England in each year since 2019; and how many and what proportion of these incidents involved Physician Associates in each year.

Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)

Information on Never Events is published by NHS England, and all available data on Never Events is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/patient-safety/never-events-data/

NHS England does not collect specific data relating to Physician Associate involvement in Never Events, and as such the information is not held.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how her Department records instances of near misses for (a) surgical fires and (b) other patient safety incidences.

Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)

Any unexpected or unintended incident which could have or did lead to harm to one or more patients can be recorded on the Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service, to support local and national learning. This can include surgical fires or burns. We are informed that NHS England does not define the severity of harm related to surgical fires or burns specifically. Grading the severity of harm related to a patient safety incident that is recorded on LFPSE, should be done using NHS England’s guidance on recording patient safety events and levels of harm, which asks that near miss events be graded as no harm. The guidance is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/policy-guidance-on-recording-patient-safety-events-and-levels-of-harm/

If a surgical fire or burn is assessed locally and constitutes a patient safety event, it would fall under the scope of the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) Regulations 16 or 18, and must be reported to the CQC. This means that the most serious surgical fires or burns which result in serious harm or the death of a service user, are subject to mandatory reporting. NHS trusts can comply with this requirement by recording patient safety events using the LFPSE service, and NHS England shares all such data with the CQC, who are responsible for regulating compliance with CQC regulations. CQC Regulations 16 and 18 are available respectively, at the following links:

https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-providers/regulations/regulation-16-notification-death-service-user

https://www.cqc.org.uk/guidance-providers/regulations-enforcement/regulation-18-notification-other-incidents

Although the recording of wider patient safety events onto LFPSE is a voluntary process, providers are encouraged to record all patient safety incidents, irrespective of the level of harm, to support local and national learning.

The LFPSE service and its predecessor, the National Reporting and Learning System, do not have specific categories for surgical fires or burns. Determining how many patient safety events related to surgical fires or burns were recorded by National Health Service providers in each of the last five years would require a search of the free text of recorded patient safety events, using key words, and a subsequent expert clinical review of all potential records to determine relevance to the question. This could only be provided at disproportionate cost.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the comments by the Royal College of Nursing that the fall in each of the past three years in applications to university nursing courses is a direct threat to patient safety, and what actions they are taking to improve patient safety in England.

Answered by Lord Markham - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

The number of applicants continues to outstrip the places on offer. Nursing training places are competitive, and lead to an attractive and important career in the National Health Service.

Record numbers of nurses are now working in the NHS, and the first ever NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, backed by over £2.4 billion of funding, will add 24,000 more nurse and midwifery training places by 2031.

Over the last decade, the Government and system partners have delivered major initiatives to advance patient safety in the NHS. This includes implementing the first NHS Patient Safety Strategy, establishing the independent Health Services Safety Investigations Body to address the most serious patient safety incidents, and appointing the first Patient Safety Commissioner to champion the patient voice in relation to the safety of medicines and medical devices.

Found: wages from increased PT responsibility Unmonetised but expected to have little impact on wages Patients

Found: Seriousness, Outcomes, Severity, Frequency with 95% CI, Neuro -developmental Impairment in Pediatric Patients