Safety standards for invasive procedures

NHS England has recently published a set of recommendations designed to make care safer for patients having invasive procedures.1 They depend in part on national and local learning from analyses of near misses, serious incidents, and “never events” and are presented as an overarching framework. NHS organisations are encouraged to work with staff and patients to develop and maintain their own standardised procedures and develop methods to evaluate their compliance with them.

These standards add to our expansive armoury of interventions to improve patient safety. Spanning almost two decades, initial efforts to improve safety concentrated on establishing the epidemiology of errors, lapses, and patient safety incidents, as well as understanding their nature. We now know that, on average, 10% of patients admitted to hospital will experience at least one adverse event as a result of their care.2 Although most adverse events are minor, some …