Definition
The PSIRF toolkit is NHS England's patient safety learning response toolkit: the set of guides and templates for running each learning response under PSIRF, including the after action review, swarm huddle, multidisciplinary team review and patient safety incident investigation. The tools were developed with human factors specialists and share the SEIPS model as their analytical base.
Source: NHS England patient safety learning response toolkit, August 2022 · Last reviewed 6 July 2026
What is in the toolkit
| Tool | What it is for | Covered on |
|---|---|---|
| After action review guide and template | Facilitated team review built on the four AAR questions | Learning responses |
| Swarm huddle guide and template | Immediate, on-site team learning after an incident | Learning responses |
| MDT review guide and template | Structured review across professions and pathways | Learning responses |
| PSII guide and report template | Full system-based investigation | PSII |
| SEIPS tools | Prompts and explorers for analysing the work system, including work-as-done observation | Learning responses |
Everything is openly published on NHS England's website, which matters more than it sounds: teams can read the actual tools before committing to training, and independent providers adopting the framework voluntarily get the same materials as trusts.
The supporting guidance set
Around the toolkit sits the guidance that governs how responses are chosen and overseen. Four documents do most of the work: the guide to responding proportionately to patient safety incidents (how to select responses and what remains nationally required), the guidance on engaging and involving patients, families and staff (the first aim in operational form), the patient safety incident response standards (what good responses and trained responders look like), and the oversight roles and responsibilities specification (who watches what, from board to ICB). The plan and policy templates complete the set. Read together, they answer most questions organisations raise during implementation.
- 01Responding proportionatelyhow responses are selected and what remains nationally required
- 02Engaging and involvingpatients, families and staff: the first aim in operational form
- 03Response standardswhat good responses and trained responders look like
- 04Oversight roleswho watches what, from board to ICB
Using the toolkit well
The organisations getting value from the toolkit share habits worth copying. They adapt the templates to their context but keep the analytical spine intact, because a template stripped of its SEIPS prompts collapses back into a chronology-plus-blame form. They match facilitators to tools through the training expectations rather than assigning whoever is free. And they resist tool inflation: the point of a swarm huddle is that it happens the same day with fifteen minutes of structure, and turning it into a mini-investigation defeats it.
The most common adaptation is local wording. Trusts rename tools, embed them in their incident systems and add service-specific prompts. None of that troubles the framework; what matters is that the response delivers the learning the plan promised.
The framework in the wild
Because every provider publishes its incident response plan, PSIRF is unusually observable. Trust PSIRPs, ambulance service toolkit adaptations and ICB oversight papers are all public, and reading a handful from organisations like yours is the fastest way to calibrate ambition. Published plans show the same pattern: a small set of local priorities with deep responses attached, standing arrangements for everything else, and increasing reuse of learning across incidents of the same type rather than response-by-response repetition.