As of March 31st, 2023, all healthcare providers are required to have at least a test mode upgrade to Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE) from their old National Learning and Reporting System (NRLS). To help you and your teams best manage the transition, we have created a number of resources, from blogs to datasheets to webinars.

This blog post serves as your Ultimate Guide to LFPSE and will cover a wide range of topics from what LFPSE is, to exactly what you should look for in your new LFPSE incident reporting system, to the migration process. It will also act as a reference guide to jump back into and refresh your memory.

What is Learn from Patient Safety Events (LFPSE)?

Learn from Patient Safety Events, or LFPSE for short, is a newer, revised way of recording patient safety incidents, risks, outcomes and good care events. The upgrade, initially, will provide two main services: recording patient safety events and giving uploaders complete, uninhibited access to data.

NHS staff are able to report any patient safety event to the national database using the core LFPSE taxonomy and have immediate access to uploaded data for local learning and improvement opportunities.

Users are able to add their own Trust-specific questions to collect data in their localised databases.

Ultimately, LFPSE is a national approach to enable learning and better informed decisions for improving patient safety.

How is LFPSE different to NRLS?

LFPSE aims to improve on NRLS with improved questions, explanations and processes to encourage the reporting of all patient safety incidents. It covers a broader range of events, too, with incidents, risks, good care events and outcomes all included.

The upgrade creates a single, national NHS system that allows the recording of patient safety incidents with more advanced technology and improved capabilities to identify trends quicker and encourage better improvement decisions. Also, every uploader has access to the data, creating deeper learning and insight.

When is the deadline to migrate to LFPSE?

NHS England announced that every NHS Trust and healthcare provider in the UK must have an LFPSE compliant incident reporting system in place, or in test phase, by 31st March 2023. NHSE amended their deadline announcement towards the end of 2022, due to a number of Trusts expressing their concerns that the one-year migration timeline was not long enough.

As a result of these concerns, the deadline was changed slightly, allowing for up to an optional 6-month period until 30th September 2023 for a longer testing, refinement and customisation phase and all providers must be fully live by then.

In our conversation with Marcos Manhaes, Head of LFPSE and Lucie Mussett, Senior Product Manager at NHS England, it was stressed that the deadline adaption has not changed the level of urgency or priority surrounding the transition to LFPSE. It remains an urgent, high-priority issue.

To summarise: all providers are required to have your preferred system in place, at least in test mode by March 31st 2023, and be fully live no later than 30 September 2023.

What benefits will LFPSE bring to Trusts?

LFPSE is designed to change what Trusts do to improve patient safety. NRLS was a solid resource for reporting and recording incident data, however, there are limitations to changes that can be made.

With LFPSE, the technology in place allows for it to be adapted in the future alongside growth and opens more opportunities for positive change by supporting users in their understanding of how incidents came about and what they can do to improve.

The transition will make it easier to record incidents, in more detail, and the data collected will be better suited to learning and information will be easier to access to support local and service-specific improvement work.

How long will migration take?

For the migration process, if not already underway, your slowest possible timeline begins now with the choice of product set and supplier, then procurement, approval, implementation, customisation, testing, training and go live by September 2023. Even on a slow path it’s imperative that you begin as soon as possible.

We go through the migration timeline in more detail in our December 2022 webinar which is now available to watch on-demand.

Once again, it’s important to emphasise that the deadline of March 2023 has not changed for getting a system chosen and into testing phase. Therefore, it’s crucial to begin the migration process as soon as possible.

The experts at InPhase set the record for the fastest migration from NRLS to LFPSE with Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust at a staggering 5 weeks and 1 day.

Whilst this achievement was driven by internal time pressures and the ending of a contract with their previous supplier, our written case study takes you through what happened during this time and how you can replicate their success. You can also hear directly from them in their presentation during our previous webinar where we discussed the process in more detail.

What should you look for in your new LFPSE-certified system?

To maximise the benefits of migration to LFPSE, there are certain features you should look for in your new system so your Trust and teams can get the most out of it. We call these the 7 Critical Elements of LFPSE, and have recently put together a blog series that details each of these essential factors. Below is a short summary of each of those as well as links to the posts that go through them in more detail.

The LFPSE Certification.

The first and most important factor is the LFPSE certification from NHS England. There are a limited number of LFPSE certified suppliers, so it’s crucial to consider the options to see which one is the right one for your Trust and its broader goals.

Incident Oversight from InPhase has been LFPSE certified since April 2022 and our team has plenty of capacity to migrate you to the system. Across the upcoming months, we can accommodate a large number of providers for the March 2023 and September 2023 deadlines.

Fast and Easy to Use.

Using Incident Oversight from InPhase decreases the amount of time it takes to report adverse events on LFPSE by an average of 45% compared to other LFPSE capture systems, meaning clinical and non-clinical time is saved across the board leaving more time free to tend to patients. Also, staff are more likely to record incidents if the process is quick and simple.

Using a lightning-fast system that runs at high-speed across mobile, tablet or desktop, users get complete, uninhibited access to the system from anywhere at any time, making incident reporting easier than ever.

A Customisable Question Manager.

LFPSE has its own core, mandatory taxonomy that helps uploaders understand the root cause of an incident and supports users in their learning. In addition to the mandatory taxonomy, it’s also crucial to be able to add localised questions for your own local use.

The InPhase Question Manager is simple to edit, so your application Administrator can make changes that are immediately deployed Trust-wide with previous versions saved automatically and no hidden costs to make said changes.

Triangulation Capabilities.

After an incident has been reported, it’s valuable to be able to triangulate that data against other key care quality information. This gives your teams the ability to cross-check incidents with audit completion and compliance on the issue and identify where policy is or is not being followed to help pin-point the specific improvement needed.

Very importantly Oversight gives your organisation the ability to drill down into data by service, ward, team or individual for both complete oversight and detailed assurance.

Real-Time Reporting.

For thorough oversight and a detailed understanding of the situation, Oversight reports are displayed in real time to be used in the Plan Do Study Act (PDSA) cycle for improvement. You must be able to follow the golden thread of cause and effect for robust improvement decision making.

In addition, data needs to be presented clearly in a way that’s easy to understand for quick and simple analysis and decision making.

Rapid Migration from NRLS.

The March 2023 and September deadlines are just around the corner. Procurement, implementation, migration of historic data, localisation, testing training and deployment all take time, so it’s important your new supplier has the ability to make the transition happen as quickly as possible if a crunch occurs.

With Incident Oversight your historic incident data can come with you to eliminate the need for keeping background legacy systems running and deliver better trend and oversights.

Integration.

As LFPSE is designed for learning and improvement, it’s important that your new supplier enables future or concurrent expansion to create one, triangulated system. Incidents, risks, mortality, health and safety, complaints, clinical audits, IPC audits, planning, performance, surveys, assurance, NICE, CQC self-assessments, performance, QI Projects, actions and more should all be available to create a system that delivers greater assurance for your Trust.

An integrated system reduces the time spent searching through multiple systems to collate data and decreases the financial drag of running several different systems.

Integrated apps with a single log on also make processes faster and more streamlined, as well as improving triangulation and real-time reporting.

How Oversight from InPhase Delivers for Trusts.

Incident Oversight from InPhase has been LFPSE certified by NHS England since April 2022, making us one of only a few certified suppliers. Our responsive user interface runs at high speed across any device, as well as intelligent Fast Forms which dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to capture incident data, makes the system incredibly fast and easy to use.

With a customisable Question Manager, you can adapt questionnaires quickly and easily with immediate deployment of changes Trust-wide at no additional or hidden costs for localised data collection and all data is triangulated against other key quality information in real time reports for complete oversight and better understanding and learning opportunities.

Our incredible team of experts migrated Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to Oversight in a record-setting amount of time, as well as bringing all historic incident data with them into one integrated system.

An upgrade to Incident Oversight allows for more opportunities for improvement, saves clinical and non-clinical time, reduces the financial impact of running multiple systems and becomes your one, integrated solution.

For more information on how Oversight can transform incident reporting for the better, schedule time with one of our experts today.

Robert Hobbs

Chief Executive Officer

InPhase’s Chief Executive and Founder, Robert has been the visionary leading InPhase to be one of the UK's leading providers of management, governance and assurance solutions, and helping organisations align their actions and goals more easily and efficiently with InPhase's suite of integrated apps.