Understanding the New Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) in NHS (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, known as PSIRF, replaces the Serious Incident Framework and provides new guidance on how NHS organisations respond to patient safety incidents. PSIRF and the supporting guidance represent a significant shift in the way the NHS responds to patient safety incidents through focusing on understanding how incidents happen to facilitate more effective learning. It provides organisations with an opportunity to review the systems it currently has in place to ensure a model is adopted which focuses on timely identification and implementation of learning. In regards to who needs to be aware of PSIRF, it is now a contractual requirement under the NHS Standard Contract for acute, ambulance, mental health, community, maternity and all specialised services. This includes organisations that provide NHS funded secondary care under the NHS Standard Contract, including independent providers for all aspects of NHS funded care. In respect of where organisations need to be at this stage of the timeline for implementation, PSIRF was published in August 2022 and organisations are expected to transition within 12 months of this publication by Autumn 2023, which will come round quickly. A comprehensive preparation guide is available on NHS England's website. We are now past the PSIRF orientation phase, where organisations were encouraged to familiarise themselves with the revised framework and associated requirements and we are now into the diagnostic and discovery phase. During this phase, organisations are encouraged to understand how developed their current systems and processes are to respond to patient safety incidents for the purpose of learning and improvement. They are encouraged to identify strengths and weaknesses and ultimately define the required improvements to support transition to PSIRF. Consulting stakeholders and getting them on board at each stage of the process is vital to ensuring organisations' smooth transition to PSIRF through system-wide engagement. The key at this stage is for organisations to identify their top priorities which will shape their new system, taking into account stakeholder feedback on their current system. I hope this has been helpful and please reach out to me if you have any questions.