Managing patient safety incidents is changing, is your practice prepared?

When changes were announced to this year’s GP contract in February 2025 it included at point 16 that ‘GP practices will be required to have regard to the patient safety strategy’. This inclusion has not received much attention but it represents the first stage in a significant move away from how many practices manage their patient safety incidents.

The strategy is a substantial document with links to multiple other long documents, procedures and processes which will eventually be fully adopted by General Practice.

It is important for practices to start preparing for adopting this change. To help practices understand this obligation we will be holding a webinar on 18 June 2025 to introduce the strategy and will provide future events looking at its implementation in more detail later in the year.

Why has this been introduced?

It has been recognised that there are between 20,000 and 30,000 incidents or avoidable significant harms identified in general practice each year.

The top 3 categories of incident include:

• Incorrect diagnosis 61%
• Medication errors 26%
• Delayed referral 11%

Despite this there is a concern that there is an underrepresentation of harm due to the lack of developed incident recording systems in primary care.

The NHS has developed the new strategy to address this concern and to ensure that patient safety incidents are consistently recorded so that learning can be achieved and patient safety continually improved.

How will this be achieved?

The Primary Care Patient Safety Strategy will focus on the following:

1. Improved communication between different areas of Primary Care
2. The implementation of a new national records service
3. Promoting a culture of safety events recording in every practice
4. Promoting an improved learning response, a “just culture” focussing on systems and not individuals;
5. Improved communication with patients during the course of clinical care
6. Implementation/adoption of a new Learn from Patient Safety Event Service (LFPSE)
7. Medical examiners independent scrutiny of all deaths that are not referred to the Coroner

What will our webinar cover?

We will be discussing the primary care and patient safety strategy in more detail and will be considering the following questions:

1. What is the Primary Care Patient Safety Strategy?
2. Why has it been introduced in General Practice?
3. What will the impact be on practices?
4. How can practices prepare for these changes?

There will be an opportunity to raise questions and to understand how we can assist you in preparing for this change.