World Patient Safety Day: Noncommunicable diseases
On Thursday 17 September 2026 the seventh annual World Patient Safety Day takes place, focused on the theme of “Safe care for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)”. One of the core objectives of this year’s World Patient Safety Day is to raise awareness of the patient safety challenges associated with NCDs throughout the course of a patient’s care and treatment. But what are NCDs? In this blog we explain what NCDs are and why they are a patient safety priority.
Listening to families in paediatrics
Peter Sidgwick, hub topic lead and a Consultant in Paediatric Intensive Care, and Julie Plumridge, a Senior Safety Partner, both work at Great Ormond Street Hospital. In a new blog, they explore the unique complexities of paediatric patient safety and why listening to children and families is critical to getting it right. Look out for a series of short videos from Peter and Julie on involving families and meaningful feedback coming soon.
Have you been involved in a patient safety investigation as a family or healthcare professional? How can patient and family engagement throughout be strengthened? Contact us at content@pslhub.org to share.
PSMN discussion on the future of HSSIB
At a recent Patient Safety Management Network (PSMN) session, members shared their views on the proposed transfer of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) functions to the Care Quality Commission (CQC). An overview of the discussion can be found here.
The PSMN is an innovative voluntary network for patient safety managers and everyone working in patient safety. It has over 2000 members from more than 650 different organisations. You can find out more about the network here.
Co-designing a social prescribing service
Connect North is an innovative, integrated and co-designed social prescribing service operating across the Northern Health and Social Care Trust (NHSCT) area in Northern Ireland. Connect North demonstrates how integrated, person-centred approaches can improve access to care, reduce system complexity and patient safety risks associated with fragmented services and delayed support. In an interview for the hub, we spoke to Claire Ramsey, Health and Wellbeing Manager at Connect North, to find out more about the service.
Are you doing something similar in your community? We would love to hear about it and share on the hub. Email content@pslhub.org.
Picker Experience Network Awards 2026
The Picker Experience Network Awards recognise best practice in patient experience across all facets of health and social care in the UK and beyond. They celebrate projects, teams, individuals and initiatives that have made exceptional contributions to care, engagement, service delivery and wellbeing from the perspective of patients, carers, families and staff. This year, Patient Safety Learning are proud to be a partner with the launch a brand new category: Patient Involvement in Patient Safety. This category recognises patients who have worked with healthcare organisations to drive meaningful safety improvements.
Extended deadline for submissions: Sunday 26 July.
Learning Disability Week in June is an opportunity to raise awareness about different learning disabilities and challenge some of the barriers people who have learning disabilities face.To mark Learning Disability Week, in our Top picks we have compiled 18 resources, blogs and reports from the hub for patients, their families and healthcare professionals on breaking down these barriers.
Craig Russo outlines the Core Needs School Pilot, a needs-led, school-based early intervention model for young people with neurodevelopmental needs. He describes how embedding clinicians in schools enables rapid, functional assessment and support without waiting for diagnosis, improving outcomes while significantly reducing costs and demand on specialist services.
In this blog, hub topic lead Risa Mallory contends that patient-centred care provides a good foundation but should not be the end goal. She calls on healthcare systems to evolve towards patient-led care, suggesting that this is key to ensuring that patients are treated as partners rather than participants.
In February, the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care hosted a participatory workshop in collaboration with academics from the University of Bristol to explore how we can guide and regulate health and care professionals who use AI.In this blog, Patrick Murphy, Policy Advisor, reflects on the messages that came out of the workshop.
In this reflective piece, Lucy Harding, a Patient Safety Partner, shares her insights around how design in healthcare can impact patient safety. She draws on her professional background and lived experience of inpatient mental health care as an autistic person, to highlight the critical relationship between design and emotional safety.
In manufacturing a missed signal can cost a product, but in healthcare it can cost a life. Annette Cairns, a leadership development specialist, asks how we can adapt the system-level thinking seen in manufacturing for the unique human complexity, variability and vulnerability that patient care brings.
Simon Wainwright, a former patient affected by the spinal surgery carried out by surgeon John Bradley Williamson, has lived with the long-term complications that have required multiple corrective operations across several hospitals. Simon reflects on the gap between the recommendations made in investigation reports and the realities patients face, and how patients like himself are often left to navigate the long-lasting complications largely on their own.
hub topic lead Julie Storr explores how IPC guidance can inadvertently lead to psychological harm when it is not applied through a person-centred lens. Drawing on literature and reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, she questions whether guidance supports both compassion and safety when applied in practice.
What does good consent look like in practice, and what are the patient safety consequences when patients are not truly informed? Join Radar Healthcare's webinar to explore the vital link between patient education, informed decision-making and safer care. Featuring perspectives from the Patients Association, Patient Information Forum, legal experts and frontline clinicians, this CPD-certified session will examine how organisations can strengthen consent processes, reduce risk and improve patient outcomes through better communication, education and insight.
This course will explain and discuss the statutory duty of candour in principle, in practice, and in context, using real examples of good and poor practice.
Recent Patient Safety Management Network meetings have included presentations on SEIPS in ophthalmology, the de-implementation toolkit and PSII on non-conveyance.
At this month's PSPN meeting Lea and Armine provided an update on their work at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, including their evaluation of the PSP role.
The June meeting was an open discussion on the future of the Patient Safety Education Network (PSEN) and what members would like to see going forward. Claire invited the group to discuss on how they feel the PSEN is going, what they want from it and future topics they would like to see covered.
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