Record a patient safety event
Patient safety incidents are any unintended or unexpected incidents which could have, or did, lead to harm for one or more patients receiving healthcare. Recording them supports the NHS to learn from mistakes and to take action to keep patients safe.
The Learn from patient safety events (LFPSE) service also supports the capture of other safety events, such as risks for the future, and examples of good care that can be learned from to improve safety.
Contents
Both healthcare staff and the general public are encouraged to record any incidents, whether they result in harm or not, to our national service for recording, sharing and learning from patient safety events, the LFPSE service.
Find out more about how we use these records to improve patient safety on our Using patient safety events to keep patients safe web pages.
For the general public
Members of the public should record patient safety incidents using the patient and public eForm via the link below:
Please note: these reports are only used to support national learning. We do not investigate individual reports and you will not receive a reply. Details of how to make a complaint about an NHS service can be found on the NHS.uk website.
Important notice: by completing one of our eForms you confirm you have read and accept the acceptance note below, and give NHS England permission to process the information you provide to learn about patient safety.
For healthcare staff
Healthcare staff are encouraged where possible to record all patient safety incidents on their organisation’s local risk management system (LRMS). These records will then be shared with the LFPSE to support national learning.
Smaller organisations, such as general practice, independent dental surgeries, community pharmacies and opticians, may not have their own LRMS. In these organisations, staff should record patient safety events directly to LFPSE.
Further information can be found on our LFPSE primary care webpage.
eForm acceptance note
If using the patient and public eForm, it is important that you acknowledge, understand and accept the following before submitting your report:
- This service is managed and operated by NHS England as part of our statutory duty to collect patient safety incident reports. Healthcare organisations, staff and the general public can report incidents either directly to the Learn from patient safety events service (LFPSE) using the links above or via an organisation’s own local risk management system. These reports support improvements to patient safety by enabling us to understand and learn from what goes wrong in healthcare.
- We do not investigate individual incidents. We use this information to improve safety by clinically reviewing reports to identify new or under-recognised patient safety risks, so appropriate action can be taken across the NHS to protect patients from harm. We also share data to support other organisations’ work to prevent the more common and persistent types of patient safety incidents.
- We do not require the identity of the reporter, patients, healthcare staff or other individuals involved in the incident. Please refrain from providing any information that could potentially enable the identification of an individual, i.e the names of individuals, patient date of birth, or NHS hospital numbers. Personal identifiable information when found by automated or manual processes is removed wherever possible before the incident report is added to our database.
- As mentioned above, we frequently share patient safety incident reports with other relevant organisations working to improve patient safety. These include CQC, MHRA, commissioners, providers, academia and others such as the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) and UK Health Security Agency.
- NHS England will only retain information for as long as necessary. Patient safety reports will remain accessible for a long period of time to continue to support the understanding of contributing factors to under-recognised risks and enable trends to be monitored over time.