The NHS Quality Strategy: how Scan4Safety supports its delivery

Blog by Tracey Herlihey, Deputy Director of Patient Safety (Digital) at NHS England.

The NHS has published its Quality Strategy for NHS-funded care in England, setting out a ten-year framework for delivering consistently high-quality care across every NHS-funded service.

The strategy re-establishes quality as the organising principle of NHS care — the purpose around which everything else is aligned — and defines it across three domains: safety, effectiveness, and experience. It sets out ten enablers for improvement, covering leadership, data, technology, transparency, and regulation.

Scan4Safety, the NHS’s approach to introducing and expanding barcode scanning in healthcare, is explicitly referenced in the strategy as an example of technology that supports delivery across all three domains.

The role of technology in delivering quality

The Quality Strategy is clear that greater use of technology must be central to efforts to deliver consistently high-quality care. It identifies technology as a means to enable safer, more person-centred care across every setting; support consistent care across pathways; capture real-time patient insight; reduce unwarranted variation; and support a continuously learning healthcare system.

This framing directly reflects what Scan4Safety has demonstrated in practice. Barcode scanning technology creates verified digital records at the point of care, linking patients to the products, people, places, and processes involved in their care. Rather than replacing clinical judgment, it removes the administrative and cognitive burden of manual recording and verification, freeing staff to focus on care.

Critically, the strategy emphasises that technology offers the greatest improvements when it is designed around how clinicians work and embedded in practice — not bolted on as an afterthought. This aligns with the quality improvement approach set out on the Scan4Safety website.

How Scan4Safety supports quality strategy delivery

The strategy explicitly references Scan4Safety as an example of technology supporting safer care, noting that it links patients, products, places, and processes across care pathways — ensuring accurate patient identification and supporting use of the right product for the right patient at the right time. Evidence cited includes Royal Cornwall Hospital NHS Trust’s 76% reduction in potential dispensing errors following the introduction of pharmacy scanning.

Scan4Safety contributes to all three quality domains identified in the strategy

On safety, barcode scanning at the point of care prevents errors before they reach patients. In operating theatres, real-time alerts flag expired or recalled products and laterality mismatches before a procedure begins. In medicines management, closed-loop verification confirms the right patient, right medicine, right dose, and right route at administration. In blood transfusion, electronic bedside verification prevents mismatched transfusions. In pathology, scanning patient wristbands before specimen collection reduces Wrong Blood in Tube errors and mislabelling. Each application creates a comprehensive audit trail that supports investigation and learning when things go wrong — directly supporting the strategy’s goal of spotting risks earlier and learning faster.

On effectiveness, Scan4Safety reduces unwarranted variation by standardising how clinical data is captured and reported. Automatic data submission to national registries including the Medical Device Outcomes Registry improves the completeness and consistency of outcome data — addressing what the strategy identifies as a significant gap in the NHS’s understanding of care quality.

On experience, releasing clinical time from manual documentation and stock management tasks returns staff attention to patients. Across six NHS demonstrator sites, more than 140,000 hours of clinical time were released to direct patient care between 2016 and 2018.

What this means for NHS organisations

The Quality Strategy signals that digital safety will be addressed explicitly in a forthcoming update to the National Patient Safety Strategy, with a clear expectation that technology is embedded in safety governance, training, and clinical roles rather than treated as a separate workstream.

This direction of travel reinforces the case for investment in the digital infrastructure that point-of-care scanning provides, whether organisations are implementing Scan4Safety for the first time or expanding into new clinical areas.

As the NHS builds towards consistently high-quality care across every setting, the foundations that Scan4Safety establishes are not optional additions to that ambition; they are part of how it gets delivered.