NHS England published the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) in 2019. This framework outlines how NHS organisations should respond to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improvement.
PSIRF replaced the previous Serious Incident Response Framework, and represents a significant shift in the way the NHS responds to patient safety incidents, centring on:
To help understand this more, you can watch this short video.
PSIRF is a major step towards improving safety management across the healthcare system in England and is greatly supporting the NHS to embed the key principles of a patient safety culture. It will ensure the NHS focuses on understanding how incidents happen, rather than apportioning blame on individuals, allowing for more effective learning and improvement, and ultimately making NHS care safer for all.
Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) have been commissioned to support the national adoption and scale up of PSIRF with fidelity to the core principles, working in collaboration with partners in NHS England's regional teams. All NHS provider Trusts have now transitioned to PSIRF, and the PSCs continue to support embedding PSIRF and learning from incidents, to inform and develop improvement work.
PSIRF has not, as yet, been mandated in primary care but it is included in the primary care patient safety strategy, which you can read here. PSCs nationally are currently piloting PSIRF in primary care with a variety of GP practices and Primary Care Networks. If you would like to find out more about PSIRF in primary care, please contact us.