Introduction
In March 2020, NHS England (NHSE) published The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). The PSIRF is a key part of the patient safety strategy (NHSE 2019) and supports the NHS to improve its understanding of safety by drawing insight and learning from patient safety incidents.
The PSIRF replaces the serious incident framework (2015) and makes no distinction between ‘patient safety incidents’ and ‘serious incidents’ and their associated thresholds no longer exist under PSIRF.
PSIRF promotes a proportionate approach to responding to patient safety incidents by ensuring resources allocated to learning are balanced with those needed to deliver improvement (NHSE, 2022).
PSIRF sets out the NHS’s approach to developing and maintaining effective systems and processes for responding to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improving patient safety.
