Midlands Patient Safety Research Collaboration

The NIHR Midlands Patient Safety Research Collaboration (PSRC) is part of the NIHR and hosted by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in partnership with University of Birmingham.


NIHR Patient Safety Research Collaborations (PSRCs) are NHS/university partnerships in England that undertake high quality translational, applied and health services research on patient safety that addresses strategic patient safety challenges within the health and care system. The PSRCs aim to develop, validate and test innovations, approaches and interventions that have the potential to lead to improvements in patient safety and the safety of health and care services. To support translation into practice, NHS/university partnerships consider the eventual setting where new interventions, innovations, approaches will be delivered and the wide range of services (including primary, secondary, tertiary, mental health and social care), settings, pathways, patients and service users. A key emphasis underpinning all research themes is the reduction in inequalities in the safety of healthcare.

Our Aim

Patient safety incidents happen when something goes wrong in the way care is delivered. Sometimes these errors result from a lack of knowledge or skill. However, research shows that most result from ‘human error’ – a clinician makes a mistake (e.g. prescribing error) or misses something (e.g. diagnostic error). Our Midlands PSRC aims to make care safer for patients by finding ways to ‘prevent’ errors in our two clinical themes – acute care and maternal health.

Our research

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