Source · Select Committees · Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 17
17
Deferred
Department fails to outline specific actions for reducing patient harm and improving safety.
Recommendation
The previous Committee were concerned that the Department was spending billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money without an effective plan to minimise future costs of the clinical negligence scheme.25 In April 2024, the Committee recommended that, by summer 2024, “the Department should set out the key reasons for patient harm and the actions it will take to address these, ensuring that its plans will reduce health disparities, ensure better patient outcomes, and reduce the costs for taxpayers”. In September 2024, in its response to the Committee’s report, the Department committed to writing to us by the end of 2024 to “set out the actions it is taking with NHS England and other system partners to reduce patient harm and advance patient safety in the NHS and improve outcomes for patients and the taxpayer”.26 It sent us a letter outlining its plans in February 2025.27 We therefore asked the Department what it was doing to reduce patient harm and advance patient safety. In response, the Department, whilst acknowledging that it should get safety as close to perfect as possible, did not set out specific actions that it was taking to progress in this area. The Department told us that the number of claims of clinical negligence remains static year on–year.28
Government Response Summary
The government agrees to prioritize patient safety and will continue ongoing work under the existing NHS Patient Safety Strategy. However, a review and update of this strategy, which will set out further actions, is deferred until after the overarching Quality Strategy is published in autumn 2025.
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Target implementation date: April 2026 4.2 The department and NHS England will continue to prioritise patient safety and a learning culture across the NHS so that harmful patient events are significantly reduced. 4.3 This includes ongoing work to progress key measures under the NHS Patient Safety Strategy, which sets out how the NHS would improve patient safety continuously. NHS England now estimate that work under the strategy is saving around 1000 lives and over £100 million in care costs each year. Initiatives such as the rollout of Martha’s Rule, and implementation of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework and the new statutory medical examiner system are making a real difference. Following publication of the 10 Year Health Plan, and then publication of an overarching Quality Strategy, NHS England will review and update the NHS Patient Safety Strategy. This work will begin once the Quality Strategy is published, currently planned for later in the autumn of 2025. 4.4. Although major efforts and other key initiatives are being progressed to promote the way safety is approached in the NHS, the department acknowledges that progress to improve patient safety and reduce patient harm is unevenly distributed and that the development of cultures of safety and learning is inconsistent.