About PSIRF

The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) is the NHS’s approach to learning from patient safety incidents and improving patient safety. It represents a significant shift from traditional investigation-focused approaches, placing greater emphasis on understanding how incidents happen and identifying opportunities for learning and improvement.

PSIRF supports organisations to take a proportionate, compassionate and systems-based approach to patient safety incident response. Rather than focusing solely on individual incidents, it encourages organisations to understand the wider factors that contribute to patient safety risks and use this learning to drive meaningful improvement.

About the Programme

Health Innovation West Midlands (HIWM) are working in partnership with Health Innovation East Midlands (HIEM) as the national lead to support the implementation of the PSIRF Insight to Improvement across all 15 Health Innovation Networks.

Our national role brings together System Safety leads from across the Health Innovation Network, enabling shared learning, developing practical tools and resources, and supporting organisations to strengthen the connection between learning from patient safety incidents and improvement activity.

Why PSIRF Matters

PSIRF enables organisations to learn more effectively from patient safety incidents and use that learning to improve care. By focusing on systems, insight and improvement, it helps organisations:

• Strengthen patient safety cultures
• Improve learning from incidents and near misses
• Involve patients, families, carers and staff meaningfully
• Target improvement activity where it can have the greatest impact
• Translate learning into measurable and sustainable change
• Improve patient safety outcomes across health and care settings

Programme Ambitions

Through our national Lead PSC role, we aim to build a clearer national picture of how systems translate insight from patient safety learning into improvement. The programme aims to strengthen the understanding of how insight from patient safety events is translated into improvement and to identify the infrastructure, capabilities and conditions that enable effective learning and improvement under PSIRF. It also supports the development of a national picture of emerging priorities, improvement activity, and the factors that help or hinder progress across NHS-funded care.

By bringing together learning and information from Patient Safety Collaboratives across England, we will identify areas of good practice, organisational readiness and emerging opportunities as well as common gaps, challenges and opportunities. This learning will support future improvement planning and inform the next phase of the programme.

Our support offer

We work alongside organisations to strengthen learning from patient safety incidents and turn insight into meaningful, measurable and sustainable improvement.

Our support includes:

Building capability
Supporting organisations to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence needed to embed PSIRF principles and approaches.

Turning learning into action
Helping organisations translate learning into measurable and sustainable improvement.

Collaboration and shared learning
Creating opportunities to share learning, spread effective practice and tackle common challenges together.

Embedding learning cultures
Supporting organisations to create environments where learning, improvement and compassionate engagement are part of everyday practice.

Who we work with

We work with organisations and teams across NHS-funded care to support the implementation of PSIRF and strengthen approaches to learning, improvement and patient safety, including:

• Acute Trusts
• Mental Health Providers
• Community Providers
• Ambulance Trusts
• Integrated Care Boards
• Patient Safety Teams
• Quality Improvement Teams
• Patient Experience and Engagement Teams

How we deliver this nationally:

• connecting and supporting System Safety leads across the Patient Safety Collaborative network;
• facilitating shared learning and collaboration;
• developing and sharing practical tools, resources and diagnostic approaches;
• supporting leadership, culture and effective oversight for improvement; and
• bringing together learning from across England to identify good practice, shared challenges and opportunities for improvement.

Find out more

Whether your organisation is beginning its PSIRF journey or looking to strengthen existing approaches, HIWM and HIEM can provide support to help build capability, accelerate learning and improve patient safety outcomes.

We are committed to helping organisations move from insight to action, ensuring learning from patient safety incidents leads to meaningful and sustainable improvements in care.