Today (17 September), marks the World Health Organisation’s World Patient Safety Day. This year’s theme ‘safe care for noncommunicable diseases’ highlights the importance of reducing avoidable harm for people living with long-term conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, cancer patients can be particularly vulnerable to harm because of the complexity of their care pathways and the number of clinical interventions they may experience throughout diagnosis, treatment and recovery.

WHO stresses that safe, high-quality care depends on continuous learning and improvement, and at PHIN we believe that transparency of information is a fundamental part of providing safer healthcare. Healthcare providers cannot improve what they cannot measure. Equally, patients deserve access to reliable information that helps them understand the quality of care they may receive.

Making safety visible

PHIN is the only source of UK-wide private healthcare information. Alongside activity, outcomes and patient experience measures, we collect information on adverse events reported by hospitals across the independent sector. These adverse events are deaths, returns to theatre, readmission following care, serious injury from care, infections, and never events (things that should never happen such as a foreign object left in the body).

This information serves several purposes. It allows hospitals and providers to monitor their own performance, compare themselves with the wider sector, and identify opportunities to improve the quality and safety of care. It also provides a level of transparency that helps patients better understand the healthcare services available to them.

A key part of patient safety is ensuring that healthcare providers are committed to reporting and learning from safety incidents. For this reason, PHIN publishes information showing whether hospitals are providing complete and up-to-date data. This allows patients to see not only measures of clinical quality and patient experience, but also whether a provider is actively participating in transparent reporting.

Progress in reporting and transparency

One of the most encouraging developments in recent years has been the improvement in reporting completeness across the sector.

In 2025, of the almost one million admissions to private hospitals in the UK, 99.2% had associated publishable adverse event information sent to PHIN, up from 90.0% in 2021.

This improvement means that patients, providers and policymakers have access to a more complete picture of healthcare quality and safety than ever before. While no healthcare system can eliminate risk entirely, comprehensive reporting helps ensure that potential issues are identified, understood and addressed. These levels of compliance reflect the sector’s growing commitment to transparency and accountability that benefits the providers and ultimately the patients themselves.

Supporting safe cancer care

This year's World Patient Safety Day theme places a particular focus on cancer and other long-term conditions.

Cancer care can involve multiple stages, from diagnosis and surgery through to chemotherapy, radiotherapy and follow-up care. As patients move through these different stages, maintaining high standards of safety and quality remains essential.

PHIN’s data suggests that of patients with malignant cancer, only 1 per 1,000 experience an unplanned readmission (an unexpected return to the same hospital after treatment), and less than 1 per 1,000 are unexpectedly transferred to another hospital or have to return to theatre.

The data should provide reassurance. Across malignant cancer admissions in the independent sector, serious safety events appear to be uncommon. By collecting and publishing this information consistently, PHIN helps ensure that conversations about healthcare quality are informed by evidence rather than assumptions.

Transparency as a foundation for trust

Patient safety is not simply about preventing harm. It is also about building confidence that healthcare providers are monitoring outcomes, learning from incidents and continuously seeking to improve.

Patients shouldn’t view hospitals having adverse events as necessarily a bad thing. The fact that they have identified and reported it, should also mean they’ve taken the steps required to stop it happening again.

Transparency plays a central role in that process:

• For patients, it provides greater visibility of healthcare quality.
• For providers, data creates opportunities for benchmarking and learning for improvement.
• For the sector, it supports informed discussions about standards and performance in safety in the UK’s independent sector.

As we mark World Patient Safety Day 2026 , PHIN remains committed to independent reporting and the publication of meaningful information to support patient care and ongoing improvements in the UK’s independent sector.