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 study began in May 2022.
