Barts Health: Using NatSSIPs 2 and Datix Data to Improve Patient Safety
Never events are rare, have no denominator, and tell you almost nothing about the quality of teamwork and systems in invasive procedure areas. In this session from the Connected Health & Care Summit 2026, Dr Annie Hunningher, Consultant Anaesthetist and Group Safety Lead at Barts Health, and lead author of NatSSIPs 2, shows how her team created NatSSIPs – mapped subcategories in Datix and built a dashboard that reveals risk and harm patterns that traditional Never Event counting alone may not capture, including a death related to implants that was not classified as a Never Event.
Watch how Barts Health mapped the National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures into Datix subcategories to create a new dataset that goes beyond never events, with real examples of work-as-done versus compliance on paper.
What the session covers and why the measurement matters
This session walks through what NatSSIPs 2 changed, why Never Events alone provide a limited measure of safety, and how Barts Health built a new data approach inside Datix. The key findings were:
- Since 2024, 372 incidents have been categorised against NatSSIPs 2 standards, with 94 involving harm
- 61% of incidents fell within the sequential standards, with implants and prostheses the highest category, despite no implant Never Events occurring
- A death related to an implant was recorded, but because it was not a Never Event, it would not have triggered the standard response
- Invasive Never Events show a downward trend at Barts Health, but the new subcategories reveal underlying risk patterns that Never Event counting alone would miss
- Documentation was the highest issue in the organisational standards, while site marking was one of the lowest
