Redesigning safety regulation in the NHS

Healthcare relies on a variety of regulatory activities to manage risks to the public and to drive improvement. But the regulation of patient safety in healthcare, and in the NHS in particular, is “bewildering in its complexity and prone to both overlaps of remit and gaps between different agencies.”1 Regulatory activities touch every single aspect of care delivery and place considerable demands on professionals and organisations alike, in the form of inspections, certification, accreditation, revalidation, and compliance reporting.

We argue that the safety regulatory system, as seen from the perspective of provider organisations, is much larger and more complex than usually supposed. Individual regulators might achieve valuable impact, but the system as a whole is unnecessarily burdensome, produces multiple unintended consequences, and, most importantly, fragments and dilutes regulatory impact. We discuss the nature of these problems and set out a series of practical proposals for tackling these critical challenges.