The professionalisation of healthcare safety investigations

This chapter looks at the professionalisation of healthcare safety investigations and the evolving role of the healthcare safety investigator in England. Drawing on the context of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) and the wider National Health Service (NHS), it proposes that professionalisation is a critical enabler of more effective learning from patient safety incidents and a key contributor to organisational learning. The chapter outlines persistent challenges in healthcare safety investigations, such as the limitations of incident reporting systems and the shortcomings of root cause analysis. It then introduces the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), which aims to shift the focus toward systems-based, compassionate, and proportionate learning responses. Next, the chapter describes HSSIB's education strategy, including CPD-accredited courses designed to build investigative capability and systems thinking. It outlines the current development of a core competency framework for healthcare safety investigators, which defines 38 competencies across personal, knowledge, and skill domains. The chapter concludes by exploring how these competencies can be embedded into practice, e.g., through professional portfolios, alignment with training programmes, the potential role of a professional body, and integration of human factors expertise. This is essential to support the wider ambition of a learning healthcare system.