Blogs
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Annual Report 2025–26: Why patient voice matters now more than ever
Read more: Annual Report 2025–26: Why patient voice matters now more than everToday, I am pleased to publish my Annual Report for 2025–26. I wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on the progress we have made but also the challenges that remain. As I look back, one theme stands out above all others: when we listen to patients, we make healthcare safer. Over the past year, I have met patients, families, clinicians, campaigners and healthcare leaders from across the country. Their experiences have reinforced something I have long believed: patients are not simply recipients of care. They are experts in their own experiences and often the first people to identify when something is going…
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‘The Safety Gap must be closed’
Read more: ‘The Safety Gap must be closed’People with sensory impairment face challenges and no more so then when it comes to managing health conditions with devices that are not designed for them and medicines they have difficulty using. I have been contacted by many patients with vision or hearing loss who experience…
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One year on from the Hughes Report
Read more: One year on from the Hughes ReportIt is one year since I published the Hughes Report on the options for redress for those harmed by pelvic mesh and valproate. When I launched the report in Parliament on 7th February 2024, I never imagined that a year later I would…
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’How the National Joint Registry supports patients undergoing surgery’
Read more: ’How the National Joint Registry supports patients undergoing surgery’At the heart of the National Joint Registry is an organisation that looks after the best interest of patients undergoing joint surgery. It does this by recording, monitoring, analysing, and reporting on the…
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Using the Patient Safety Principles to improve culture
Read more: Using the Patient Safety Principles to improve cultureAll healthcare work sometimes includes making truly difficult decisions, decisions that can have serious consequences for patients and their families, now, or in the future. This stretches from wards to Boards and into every part of the healthcare system. You only need…
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’Striking the right balance with antidepressant prescribing’
Read more: ’Striking the right balance with antidepressant prescribing’Antidepressant prescribing is at record levels in England, with around one in five adults receiving these medicines for a range of mental health conditions and chronic pain. Prescriptions have…
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’Ask for something that is actionable’
Read more: ’Ask for something that is actionable’I am the chief executive of Demos, a cross-party think tank that works to put people at the heart of policy making to improve how policy is developed as well as trust in politics. Think tanks sit outside government and are…
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The New Zealand Experience
Read more: The New Zealand ExperienceIn 2016 the Health Quality Safety Commission (HQSC) in NZ launched a five-year programme that improved and standardised the way health care systems recognised and responded to deterioration. There were three main work streams…
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‘New principles will help us make the right choices’
Read more: ‘New principles will help us make the right choices’Every day we have to make tough choices, balancing benefits and risks. Those choices impact on patient safety, right now or far into the future, with effects that we might have never intended or anticipated. There are too many tragedies where people…