"Primary care – general practice, community pharmacy, optometry and dental services – delivers 90% of NHS interactions, face to face, by phone or online."
The Primary Care Patient Safety Strategy was published in September 2024 and describes the national and local commitments to improve patient safety in primary care, supporting all areas in this sector to fully implement the NHS Patient Safety Strategy.
It focuses on:
- Developing a supportive, learning environment and just culture in primary care, with sharing across the system so that the services can continually improve
- Ensuring that the safety and wellbeing of patients and staff is central, and that our approach to managing safety is systematic and based on safety science and systems thinking
- Involving patients in the identification and co-design of primary care patient safety ambitions, opportunities and improvements
While secondary care often has more structured and well-established frameworks for reporting patient safety incidents, primary care tends to have more variability and gaps in this area. This discrepancy means that potentially valuable data and insights from primary care settings may not be fully captured or utilised for broader learning and improvement.
This strategy aims to continuously enhance patient safety by utilising existing processes and structures as much as possible, rather than creating additional work.
Source: www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/primary-care-patient-safety-strategy/#patient-safety-in-primary-care
