Website of the Department of Health

Ensuring the safety of everyone that comes into contact with health services is one of the most important challenges facing health care today, not just in the UK but worldwide.

The Department of Health's response to the recent inquiry into children's heart surgery at Bristol Royal Infirmary - Learning from Bristol - reinforced and built on our agenda to ensure the safety of NHS care and to learn from adverse events - a programme established by the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, and a key part of The NHS Plan, the Government's 10 year modernisation agenda for the NHS.

The National Patient Safety Agency, established in 2001, has a key role in implementing this agenda, and will run a new national system for reporting, analysing and learning from adverse incidents involving NHS patients.

Over time, the agency will begin to give us a real handle on the scale of the problem - a baseline allowing us to understand the real extent and nature of adverse events, and act on that knowledge.