'Never Events' are serious patient safety incidents that should not happen if the right safety checks are in place. This page explains what Never Events are, why they are recorded, and how the information can be used when discussing your care with a consultant or hospital.

What are Never Events?

Never Events, sometimes referred to in the healthcare system as adverse events, are serious and preventable incidents where a patient has been put at unnecessary risk of harm.

Not all harm in healthcare can be prevented, but Never Events are incidents that should not occur if correct procedures are followed. Healthcare professionals must record and report these incidents even when a patient is not seriously harmed.

There are three categories of Never Events:

• Surgical Never Events include serious incidents which take place in surgery, such as the surgeon operating on the wrong part of the body, inserting the wrong implant or operating on the wrong patient.
• Medication Never Events are where patients have been given the wrong medication, the wrong dose of medication, or the way the medication was administered was wrong.
• General Never Events are other incidents which include health and safety incidents, such as a patient becoming trapped in equipment like a hospital bed.

Why do hospitals record Never Events?

All healthcare providers are required to record and investigate Never Events. The investigations are used to help hospitals understand what went wrong and put in place processes to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.

Hospitals must record Never Events involving NHS-funded patients and report them to NHS England. Hospitals treating privately funded patients are required to report Never Events to PHIN.

What can Never Events tell you about a hospital?

The first thing you should look for is whether the hospital is monitoring and reporting their never events at all. Hospitals that record and report Never Events are likely to have a strong focus on patient safety and learning from past mistakes.

If a hospital does not record and report serious safety incidents, this may lead you to question their care quality and whether they adequately monitor safety in their hospitals, and what this might mean for your care.

If a hospital has reported one or more Never Event, you may want to ask what actions were taken to stop it happening again and how this could affect you.

The Never Events on our website cannot tell you the full story of what is going on at each hospital, so this information is best used as a starting point for discussions, rather than a reason to rule out a hospital on its own.

Your checklist

1. Check whether your local hospital is reporting their Never Events. If they aren’t, what does this say about safety in the hospital, and what could this mean for your care?
2. Understand your hospital’s Never Events. If your hospital has recorded Never Events, what type of incident was it, what did they do about it and might this be relevant to your care?
3. Ask questions. Use our information and the published numbers to ask your GP or consultant about the hospital’s safety procedures. You need to be confident that they are the right hospital for you.

Further reading

You can also read how we calculate Never Events data on our website and datasheets.