In addition to the services delivered by the Medical Exposures Group (MEG) in UKHSA, the Radiotherapy team leads on the national patient safety initiative in radiotherapy. One workstream includes the maintenance and development of the national incident learning system for radiotherapy errors and near miss events (RTE).

RTE are submitted on a voluntary basis by radiotherapy departments throughout the UK to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) or Learning from Patient Safety Events System or Once for Wales Concerns Management System (Datix Cymru) or directly to UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA). RTE are analysed based on the classification from Towards Safer Radiotherapy and the pathway coding, including safety barriers (failed & effective) and causative factor taxonomy from the Development of Learning from Radiotherapy Errors.

The Radiotherapy team, in conjunction with the Patient Safety in Radiotherapy Steering Group (PSRT) provide regular updates on their work via the Safer Radiotherapy E-Bulletin, publish learning from these events, on a triannual basis and summarised on a biennial basis, so their occurrence might be mitigated. To receive notifications of new Safer Radiotherapy publications sign up to e-subscribe.

To better support RT providers with trend comparison, the UKHSA produces national aggregate RTE data on an annual basis. The national data is available by calendar year as an Excel spreadsheet and will include:

  • Data quality of aggregate RTE reports
  • Number and classification level of RTE reports per provider
  • Number and classification level of aggregate RTE reports per month
  • Classification level of aggregate RTE reports
  • Process subcodes of aggregate RTE reports
  • Failed safety barriers of aggregate RTE reports
  • Causative factors of aggregate RTE reports

If you are a RT provider reporting to the national radiotherapy incident learning system and would like to receive this dataset, please email RTEdata@UKHSA.gov.uk with the following:

  • Organisation name
  • How you propose to use the national aggregate RTE data