When things go wrong in care, it is vital incidents are recorded to ensure learning can take place. By learning, we mean people working out what has gone wrong and why it has gone wrong, so that effective and sustainable actions are then taken locally to reduce the risk of similar incidents occurring again.



We manage and operate the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS), which is the world’s largest and most comprehensive patient safety incident reporting system and receives over two million reports each year.





This national system receives incident reports via healthcare organisations’ own local risk management systems where people are encouraged to record details of incidents to support local learning. A small proportion of incidents are also recorded directly on the NRLS, usually where people don't have a local risk management system to record incidents.