The Response Study - an evaluation of the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) in the English NHS
This project aims to understand how the roll out of Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) is implemented across the NHS in England and the impact it has..
Duration: May 2022 to August 2025
Funder: National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health and Social Care Delivery Research programme
Partners:
University of Leeds
CHILL investigators:
Professor Carl Macrae
Research summary
Background:
Carl is jointly leading, with Prof Jane O'Hara at University of Leeds, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) "Response Study”, a 3 year evaluation of the national implementation of NHS England's new Patient Safety Incident Response Framework that determines how organisations across the NHS analyse, investigate and learn from safety incidents
In August 2022, NHS England launched a new way of responding to safety events, called the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). The PSIRF policy aims to support NHS organisations to be more flexible in how they respond to safety events. One of the key changes is that NHS organisations will no longer be required to investigate every event that results in harm.
This new policy is likely to have important effects: it may create new opportunities for learning by allowing NHS organisations to focus on the most serious safety problems, but it might also have implications for fairness and equity in responses to safety events.
The Response Study is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). The aim of the Response Study is to understand, in real time, how the roll out of this new policy happens across the NHS in England, and what impact it has. This will inform the way future patient safety policies are developed and launched. This study will combine a range of different types of research, examining how the policy works broadly across the NHS and in depth at a range of NHS organisations.
The learning from this research has the potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of the PSIRF, as well as the development and roll out of future patient safety policies. Ultimately, this should help to improve the safety of care and reduce patient harm across the NHS.
