Patient safety incident reporting
Published on: 22nd July 2013 | Updated on: 24th May 2024
Since 2005, pharmacy contractors have been required to record patient safety incidents in an incident log and report these to the National Reporting and Learning Service (NRLS).
In 2021, a replacement for the NRLS – the Learn from patient safety events (LFPSE) service – was launched and contractors should now use that system for reporting patient safety incidents.
Read more about the LFPSE service
The requirements for patient safety incident reporting by community pharmacy contractors are set out in the Approved Particulars.
How to report patient safety incidents
As part of the clinical governance provisions in the Terms of Service, contractors have to report patient safety incidents to the NHS.
The way to make these reports is via the LFPSE service website. Where this service is used to report incidents, the pharmacy team member making the report will first need to register to be able to access the LFPSE. The registration process includes identifying their pharmacy in a list of organisations within the registration system. Pharmacies can be found by selecting ‘Other’ organisations and then searching using the pharmacy name or ODS code.
Some pharmacies instead report incidents via their head office/superintendent pharmacist/trade body, who will then record these (for example in specialist software systems, often described as Local Risk Management Systems) and also report them to the LFPSE service.
To facilitate the collection and recording of the information needed to report an incident, the following forms have been produced which community pharmacies may choose to use.
Recording pharmacy errors:
Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Incident (Pharmacy Error) Report Form (Microsoft Word)
Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Incident (Pharmacy Error) Report Form (PDF)
Recording errors/incidents external to the pharmacy (e.g. prescribing errors):
Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Incident (External Incident) Report Form (Microsoft Word)
Community Pharmacy Medication Safety Incident (External Incident) Report Form (PDF)
Other patient safety resources
Community Pharmacy England Patient safety alert information page
Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group
Report CD incidents to the relevant CDAO
GPhC email reminder on dispensing valproate
Patient safety report: Completing the patient safety report (PDF) – Community Pharmacy England has worked with the Community Pharmacy Patient Safety Group to produce this resource, which provides contractors with information on how to complete a patient safety report, as well as worked examples of a monthly and annual patient safety report template.
Monthly patient safety report template (Word)
Monthly patient safety report template (PDF)
Patient safety report template (Word)
Patient safety report template (PDF)
For more information on this topic please email regulations.team@cpe.org.uk
