Report into patient safety incidents

The NHS Commissioning Board Authority has published the latest set of Organisation Patient Safety Incident data.    

The figures show that there were 612,414 patient safety incidents in England between 1st October 2011 and 31st March 2012 that were submitted to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) by 31st May 2012. This is an increase of 2.3% compared to the previous reporting period (1st April 2011 to 30th September 2011.)

The NRLS is a voluntary reporting tool. It captures, analyses and feeds back patient safety incident reports to the NHS. Reporting and analysis of safety related incident reports, including incidents resulting in no or low harm, provides an opportunity to reduce the risk of future incidents through learning.

The figures show that:

• 413,459 (68%) of patient safety incident reports resulted in no harm to the patient;
• 154,681 (25%) resulted in low harm;
• 39,039 (6%) resulted in moderate harm;
• 5,235 (1%) resulted in death or severe harm.

The most common types of incident reported were:

• patient accidents– slips, trips and falls (26%);
• medication incidents (11%);
• incidents relating to treatment and/or procedures (11%).

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