Patient safety toolkit
This toolkit is intended to aid the assessment of different aspects of patient safety with a view to making improvements.
Significant Event Audit
This guidance enables primary care teams to conduct an effective Significant Event Audit (SEA) with the aim of improving care for all patients.
SEA ensures that primary care teams learn from patient safety incidents and ‘near misses’ by highlighting both strengths and weaknesses in the care provided.
The guidance can help primary care teams to develop a structured and effective SEA process. Also, a link is provided for reporting safety incidents in England.
For practices in England, it is good practice to report to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) any patient safety incidents that could have or did harm a patient receiving NHS funded care so they can be learnt from and any necessary action can be taken to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
- Reporting a patient safety incident in England - a specific form is available from reports from general practices.
To our knowledge, the other countries in the UK do not have national reporting systems for patient safety incidents in primary care, but it is worth checking if local systems are in place.