On Wednesday 13 May 2026, Kings Charles III delivered his annual speech in the Lords Chamber at the State Opening of Parliament. Written by the Government and delivered by the Monarch, the speech presents opportunity at the start of a new parliamentary session for a government to set out its plans for the year ahead.
Patient Safety Learning highlights six key takeaways from this speech from a patient safety perspective.
Speaking up for patient safety
In our Speaking up for patient safety interview series, NHS whistleblower Peter Duffy and Patient Safety Learning’s Chief Executive Helen Hughes explores with guests how the healthcare system responds when its staff raise concerns about patient safety.
In the latest episode, Helen and Peter speak to Rebecca Wight, a nurse consultant practitioner. Rebecca talks about what happened to her when she tried to raise patient safety concerns about a colleague. Despite escalating these concerns to management and clinical leadership, Rebecca reported being ignored, having her concerns dismissed as a personal attack, and facing a "brick wall" from leadership.
Please read the accompanying guidance when using this within your teams. We'd love to hear your feedback!
Investigating harm with humanity
In December 2022, Dylan Cope, a 9 year old boy, died of sepsis after being discharged from hospital. A coroner found the boy's death “would have been avoided if he had not been erroneously discharged”, and said what happened "amounts to a gross failure of basic care”.
In a blog for the hub, Dylan’s mum Corinne Cope draws on her lived experience to explain what accountability means to bereaved families and harmed patients. Corinne also shares the guidance she has developed aimed to support NHS investigators and system leaders to strengthen the quality and humanity of investigations, ensuring ownership, reflection and sustained learning.
When learning is still mistaken for blame
We talk often about learning cultures, just culture and systems thinking. We have national frameworks, thoughtful strategies and well-intentioned leaders. However, an anonymous blog shared with the hub reminds us how fragile that progress still is.
Read all our blogs in our Florence in the Machine series — an area for anonymous health and care staff to blog about the state of the health service as they experience it on a daily basis. If you work in health or social care and would like to share your experience on the hub, email content@pslhub.org.
The 5 May was WHO's World Hand Hygiene Day. To support the day, we pulled together useful resources in our Hand hygiene top picks. We also heard from Claire Kilpatrick, consultant to WHO and who has co-led on World Hand Hygiene Day since its launch, on why she has always been actively involved in the campaign and what it means for patient safety.
Protocols, targets and pathways save lives. They give us essential structure to deliver safe, high‑volume care with finite resources, and they have transformed the NHS for the better. But as the healthcare experience becomes increasingly streamlined, Hannah Little, Assistant Chief Nursing Officer at North Bristol NHS Trust, asks: who are we leaving behind?
Julie Smith is a content director for a patient information library, and a Topic leader for the hub. In this blog, she draws on recent research and her own expertise to explain why deprioritising patient education represents a failure to keep patients safe.
The 2025 review of patient safety in England, chaired by Dr Penny Dash, proposed changes intended to coordinate and rationalise patient safety roles and responsibilities. In this long-read article Patient Safety Learning reflects on NHS England’s proposals to implement one of these changes, the abolition of the National Guardian’s Office.
Martin Fletcher, hub topic lead for professionalisation and regulation, asks: how do we better connect the work of professional regulation with a systems focus on improving patient safety? And how do we navigate this interface in a health and societal context which is rapidly changing?
In healthcare, we often talk about 'never events'—serious incidents that should not occur if appropriate systems are in place. But what happens when they do occur? Victoria Prabhu worked with a group of anaesthetic resident doctor colleagues on a patient safety project that began with exactly that question.
This blog argues that discharge decisions should not rely too heavily on point-in-time observations, early warning scores or apparent mobility when serious unresolved pathology may still exist in the background.
In healthcare, developing a culture of psychological safety is essential to ensuring patient safety; a priority identified in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy. In the context of 10 Year Health Plan for England and healthcare leaders' commitments to psychological safety across all developed nations, it is essential that the safety of patients and staff is at the core of its design and delivery to avoid harm and reduce incidents. If the healthcare system is to truly be transformed over the next decade, matters of culture need to be addressed.
This practical and engaging two-day course will explore how the SEIPS (Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety) framework can be applied within health and care investigation and design to support safer, more effective systems and services.
This month, Julie Smith, Programme Manager at Kent Surrey Sussex Health Innovation, gave an update on Martha’s Rule acute in NHS trusts; Rachel Pool (NHS England) gave a presentation on using Copilot in patient safety; and Rosie Benneyworth, Chief Executive of the Health Services Safety Investigation Body (HSSIB), gave a presentation on “Drowning in recommendations”.
At the PSEN meeting in May, Helen Hartley presented on the ‘Growth and success of Human Factors (HF) training across Lincolnshire Community and Hospitals NHS Group’.
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