Reporting incidents to us

Incident reporting

The most common categories of patient safety incident reports are:

• A delay in an ambulance resource being provided
• A breakdown in communications with ambulance staff
• The clinical care provided by ambulance staff.

If you report an incident, we will investigate it and then provide you with a response and an explanation of any action we propose to take.

Depending on the severity of the issues you report, we may pass them to the department responsible and keep you informed with what is happening. Wherever possible, we will try to hold local liaison meetings to improve the working relationship we have with health and social care colleagues to increase understanding of our respective roles and practices. Our local ambulance operations manager or a member of the local management team will usually lead these meetings.

Patient Safety Investigations

The London Ambulance Service is an early adopter of the new national Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF). The framework sets out how we will learn from patient safety incidents to keep improving the quality and safety of the care we provide. Its aims were coproduced nationally with people who use services, their families and staff.

The framework is made up of two elements – national guidance which sets priorities which must be investigated in depth, and a local plan, which has been developed by our Trust and details additional incidents for investigation. Our plan details how we should respond to incidents and how and when investigations should be carried out.

You can download a copy of our new Patient Safety Incident Response Plan (PSIRP) here:

We are helping to test the plan before they are rolled out across the rest of the NHS in Spring 2022. This initiative forms part of the NHSE/I Patient Safety Strategy

We remain committed to offering our full cooperation with any investigations across the wider healthcare system. If your Trust is considering declaring an SI, or has already declared an SI, please let us know by emailing our Governance and Compliance department and marking your notification ‘Serious Incident’.