Chief Nurse responsibility for deceased safeguarding
Fuller Inquiry · Fuller Inquiry Phase 2 Report · Issued 15 July 2025 · Addressed to: NHS England
Government responseDepartment of Health and Social Care: Accepted in part (Dec 2025)
DeliveryDepartment of Health and Social Care says in progress (Jul 2026)NHS England states no delivery position (Jun 2026)
Recommendation, verbatim from the inquiry
●Inquiry recommendation
The remit of the Chief Nurse in NHS trusts should explicitly include executive responsibility for safeguarding the security and dignity of deceased people in NHS mortuaries and body stores.
Fuller Inquiry, Fuller Inquiry Phase 2 Report · 15 Jul 2025 Source PDF →
Published evidence summary
AI-generated evidence summary
In July 2026, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health Innovation and Safety Preet Kaur Gill reported that NHS England had issued a national system letter detailing actions expected of trusts to deliver improvements consistently (Preet Kaur Gill, Jul 2026). In that June 2026 letter, it mapped this recommendation to its Safeguarding Accountability and Assurance Framework as supporting guidance (NHS England, Jun 2026). The Department of Health and Social Care had previously accepted the recommendation in principle in December 2025, stating that acceptance was "subject to further work to determine the full impact of these recommendations" (Department of Health and Social Care response, Dec 2025).
AI-generated summary of the record on this page, checked by a second model and automatic checks, 26 Sep 2026.
About this summary
Government response
●Department of Health and Social Care · Accepted in part · 16 Dec 2025
The government has agreed to accept in principle 43 recommendations subject to further work to determine the full impact of these recommendations.
Extract from: Interim update on government progress in responding to the Fuller inquiry phase 2 report
Delivery
●Department of Health and Social Care says in progress · 15 Jul 2026
NHS England has also issued a national system letter setting out the actions expected of each NHS trust and providers to ensure improvements are delivered consistently.
From: Government update on Progress in responding to the Fuller Inquiry Phase 2 report, Preet Kaur Gill, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health Innovation and Safety
●NHS England states no delivery position · 26 Jun 2026
Recommendations 19, 20 and 21 (relevant to safeguarding)
The full text of these recommendations can be found in the Phase 2 Report (pp.266-267).
Supporting guidance
NHS Safeguarding Accountability and Assurance Framework (see entry 6 in Annex 1).
How this page is built
The recommendation and the government responses are verbatim from primary documents. Delivery statements and other bodies' findings are shown in their own words, each with its source. The summary is written by this site and labelled as such. The Index does not paraphrase sources or characterise intent; it records what has been published.