The Covid-19 pandemic put a never-before-seen strain on healthcare providers that they will be recovering from for the foreseeable future. The usual 1M annual users of the NHS avoided the service during the pandemic to prevent further strain on the service, avoid catching the virus or have had their consultations pushed back to accommodate the number of Covid patients that had taken precedent.

Incident reporting is vital for healthcare providers to advance learning, improvements, and patient care. However, due to a lengthy, complex reporting process, minor incidents often go unreported, giving an inaccurate overview of adverse events. For more reliable data, better learning, and continuing to work towards delivering better standards of patient care, NHS England strongly encourages reporting of incidents, despite much of it being voluntary.

Incident reporting for healthcare providers is crucial to advance improvements and aid patient safety. As a result of lengthy, complex incident reporting processes, minor incidents aren’t being reported as often as they should. Although incident reporting is voluntary, NHS England encourages the reporting of events to continue working towards better standards of care for patients by avoiding recreating past mistakes that caused harm and inspiring change to outdated processes.