The lowdown on LFPSE: Learn from patient safety events

All NHS organisations must report on LFPSE by March 2023, according to NHS Improvement and NHS England. For independent organisations, reporting is mostly voluntary, though the NHS does strongly encourage it. Some independent organisations that provide NHS-funded services may have different requirements agreed upon with their commissioners so be sure to keep an eye out for these. But for all NHS organisations, it’s March 2023.

Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Trust was the first to report on the new system, thanks to the help of our flexible team.

Although the implementation deadline has been extended to September 2023, NHS England has stated that you must have an approved supplier in place by March 2023 to allow for testing and configuration.

For NHS trusts, the simple answer is yes, it’s mandatory. And for any organisations reporting to NHS England to fulfil duties for other statutory or mandatory requirements, such as informing the CQC about notifiable incidents, LFPSE is mandatory. Participation for all healthcare organisations is strongly encouraged to support both national and local safety interventions which serve as a foundation for a strong safety culture.

A list of approved suppliers who passed LFPSE testing can be found on the NHS website. Radar Healthcare was the first supplier to pass LFPSE testing, and we worked with the first trust, Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, to integrate the system.

Remember that you can only begin reporting to LFPSE using the most recent live version of the software, so keep that in mind and ask your provider if you do have any concerns. If you want to transfer systems, you still have time, and it doesn’t have to be difficult. Radar Healthcare partners with organisations like yours to ensure that you have everything you need ahead of the 2023 deadline.

With the deadline to be LFPSE compliant fast approaching, and with some risk management systems not there yet, particularly those which are web-based, you may want to reduce the risk and switch to a new supplier now. If you are happy with your current supplier, make sure you check what their plan is for becoming compliant. A list of fully compliant suppliers can be found here.

Radar Healthcare supports a variety of event recordings, not just LFPSE. The benefit of using a system like ours is that not only can you keep track of everything in one place, but as an LFPSE-compliant local risk management system, you know that your data is automatically sent to the NHS for LFPSE.  On top of that, our analytics module gives valuable insight into the data you’re recording, allowing you to observe what’s going on across your entire organisation, assisting you not only to submit the data to the NHS but also to see how you can become more outcome focused and prevent it from happening again.

t will vary depending on the organisation, but the good news is that our software is extremely customisable, and our LFPSE events module was created in collaboration with the NHSI and MKUH to help organisations like yours.  Allowing you to keep track of important data and maintain a traceable workflow that sends alerts to ensure you don’t miss anything. If you’re interested in more events, find them here.

Being compliant essentially means that you can demonstrate the required information can be recorded and uploaded automatically to the NHS via the LFPSE API. To be a compliant supplier, organisations must meet a series of requirements that prove their risk management system complies with LFPSE requirements.