Improving patient safety was identified as a key goal for the NHS in the DoH report, Building a Safer NHS for Patients (2001). This built on the seminal report, An Organisation with a Memory (2000), which estimated that adverse events in which harm is caused to patients happen in an unnerving 10% of admissions to NHS hospitals (c.850,000 cases a year) costing at least £2bn p.a. The report considered around half these incidents to be preventable. A new online briefing released today by Civitas looks at how the NHS been doing since. <click here>