Government progress against recommendations on patient safety in the NHS to be evaluated
24 October 2023
The Government’s progress against patient safety recommendations it has agreed to implement is the focus of a new evaluation by the committee’s independent Expert Panel.
Experts will consider a range of recommendations made by public inquiries and reviews on patient safety, including whistleblowing, which have been accepted by government, and select a number of these for evaluation. The Panel will in its final report provide a rating of the Government’s progress against each of these recommendations.
Steve Brine MP, Chair of the Health and Social Care Committee, said:
“We’ve now had a large number of public inquiries, around failures in patient safety, and we owe it to them all before we embark on another one to see if what’s been recommended before has actually happened.
“The Expert Panel will therefore, as I promised in the wake of the Letby verdict, be carrying out an important body of work in evaluating the Government’s progress to implement crucial patient safety related recommendations made by a range of inquiries and reviews.
“The Committee looks forward to considering the Expert Panel’s findings in due course.”
Professor Dame Jane Dacre, Chair of the Expert Panel, said:
“The confidence of patients in the NHS can be shattered when failures in patient safety make headlines.
“In the most serious cases, a public inquiry or review appointed to examine what has gone wrong is likely to produce a series of recommendations for actions to safeguard against future lapses.
“We want to find out what progress has been made by the government on recommendations it has accepted to improve patient safety in the NHS and will be reporting our findings to the Health and Social Care Committee.”
Further information
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