Health written question – answered at on 5 December 2011.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what assessment he has made of the effect of the provisions of the Health and Social Care Bill on (a) patient safety and (b) safeguarding children in London.
Clause 20 of the Health and Social Care Bill inserts section 13Q into the National Health Service Act 2006 and is intended to give the NHS Commissioning Board responsibility for the functions currently carried out by the National Patient Safety Agency in respect of reporting and learning from patient safety incidents. The intention is to ensure that patient safety is embedded into the health service through commissioning and the contracts commissioners agree with providers.
The NHS Commissioning Board will be uniquely placed in the system to utilise the information gathered by the reporting and learning function to support, encourage and enable safety improvement in the NHS. It will be able to combine insight from safety reporting with operational knowledge, leadership, authority and system oversight, to ensure appropriate levers, initiatives and support are provided to the NHS to improve safety.
It is essential that current safeguarding responsibilities are sustained and taken over by new organisations such as clinical commissioning groups. NHS bodies have a statutory duty to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, and are statutory members of Local Safeguarding Children Boards. These duties will transfer to the new organisations under the Health and Social Care Bill.
In response to a recommendation in Professor Eileen Munro's review of child protection, the Department of Health and the Department for Education published on
As part of that programme, work is in hand to develop an accountability framework for the NHS contribution to safeguarding children, setting out more detail on the proposed new arrangements. This will set the framework for development both within the NHS and in local partnership arrangements.
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