Review of the NHS in England's Records of Incident Response Levels.

Abstract

Objective: For the National Health Service (NHS) in England, incidents are defined as events that disrupt, or might disrupt, an organisation's normal service provision below acceptable levels and require special arrangements to be put in place. NHS England is responsible for coordinating regional responses to incidents. Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) are responsible for coordinating local responses to incidents. This review assessed the records of regional and local incident responses held by NHS England and ICBs respectively.

Methods: The outcome of interest was the quantity of information regarding days at an incident response level held by organisations responsible for coordinating that level of incident response.

Results: NHS England had a record of the number of days at regional incident response level for 3 of its 7 regions. 24 of the 42 ICBs had records of the number of days at local incident response level.

Conclusion: NHS England and ICB records of incident responses for which they are responsible were incomplete. They might benefit from reviewing how they measure and record this information. This review may also be of interest to other bodies at local, regional and state level which coordinate hospitals in response to incidents.