HospitalCheck

Never Events (patient safety)

Published by NHS England · Official source

Update schedule

  • Annual (financial year), published provisionally and updated through the year.

Level of detail

  • NHS trust

What we show

  • The number of Never Events NHS England lists as reported occurring at the trust in the financial year

Caveats

  • Never Events are rare, serious, wholly-preventable patient-safety incidents — for example wrong-site surgery, a retained instrument, or the wrong implant.
  • This is a RAW COUNT and it is NOT a comparative measure of trust safety. NHS England publishes this list to prompt learning and improvement, not to rank or compare trusts. A trust carrying out far more surgery will tend to log more Never Events in absolute terms even with equal or better underlying safety.
  • We deliberately show no league table, ranking, or badge for this dataset anywhere on the site, and we never fold it into an overall safety score.
  • Reported per trust — the same figure applies to every hospital the trust runs, always labelled 'Trust-wide'.
  • The source table has no organisation code, only a name, so we match trusts by name. A small number of names in the source (for example a treatment centre reported by an Integrated Care Board rather than a trust) do not match any trust and are not shown.
  • Figures are provisional and can be revised as local investigations conclude. Only trusts that appear in NHS England's published table are shown — we do not infer a zero count for a trust that is absent from it.

Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.