ICBs need to identify digital clinical safety officers to support general practice in implementing digital tools safely, NHS England has said.
The new NHS England primary care patient safety strategy, published last week, set out a series of improvements to be made in primary care, but stressed they were not ‘contractual requirements’.
It called on ICBs to identify safety officers to help provide ‘effective digital and implementation support and training’ to primary care.
The strategy also said ICBs must procure safe digital products for general practice that meet quality assured standards, including the clinical risk management standard DCB0129, and to ensure they are usable and accessible for both patients and the workforce.
It said: ‘Digital suppliers are required to ensure clinical safety documents showing compliance with clinical risk management standard DCB0129 are completed, regularly reviewed, updated and shared with the ICBs as part of their legal duties, similarly ICBs are required to complete and regularly review clinical safety documents showing compliance with DCB0160.
‘ICBs should involve general practice staff and patient groups in the digital tool procurement processes and provide practical support to general practice to implement digital tools effectively and safely utilising evidence based best practice guidance. ICBs should facilitate sharing of best practice between general practices utilising the same software.’
It comes after the digital pathways framework, which was intended to be an approved list of tools available to practices for functions including booking and online consultations, was cancelled by NHS England in June.
The strategy also called on ICBs to support the adoption of patient safety frameworks in primary care in order to share insight and learning from incidents.
GP practices are now expected to record incidents nationally, with NHS England wanting ‘single, simple patient safety event recording form and process, with improved quality of incident (patient safety event), near miss (sometimes called good catches), good practice events and risk recording’.
It said ICBs should develop mechanisms that support the adoption of the new Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) service and the Patient Safety Incident Support Framework (PSIRF), which will enable this recording in primary care.
The LFPSE replaces the previous National Reporting and Learning System, which closed in June 2024, and the PSIRF was originally launched in secondary care in 2022.
NHSE said: ‘While there is no intention to lift and shift PSIRF directly from secondary care into primary care, we want to implement its concepts of proportionate, flexible and contextual into the primary care response to incidents, dependent on local configurations.’
According to the strategy, the ‘culture of incident reporting’ in general practice is ‘relatively underdeveloped’ compared with secondary care.
It highlighted that while over a fifth of new claims to NHS Resolution are from general practice, only 1% of the 2.2 million incidents recorded nationally each year are from primary care.
This is the first patient safety strategy for primary care and was based on NHSE’s recognition that the strategy for the wider NHS from 2019 ‘needs more specific interpretation’ for GP practices.
NHSE expects some improvements to be implemented first in GP practices before being rolled out more widely to other primary care providers.
The document also said ICBs should:
- Give general practice staff the opportunity to complete the NHS staff survey,
- Ensure primary care staff have access to Freedom to Speak Up guardians to ensure they have a voice,
- Alongside GP practices, pilot approaches and share good practice for locally-derived patient safety improvements relating to the three patient safety themes of diagnosis, medication and referral.
The strategy said: ‘Given the capacity pressures in primary care and ICBs, this strategy seeks to continuously improve patient safety through existing processes and structures as much as possible, rather than adding work.’
