Serious Reportable Events aka "Never Events"
Preventing adverse events in healthcare is central to NQF's patient safety efforts. To ensure that all patients are protected from injury while receiving care, NQF has developed and endorsed a set of Serious Reportable Events (SREs). This set is a compilation of serious, largely preventable, and harmful clinical events, designed to help the healthcare field assess, measure, and report performance in providing safe care.
The SREs focus on the following areas:
Learn More About NQF's SREs
Originally endorsed in 2002 as a set of adverse events that occur in hospitals, NQF's list of SREs has since evolved to account for a range of clinical settings where patients receive care, including office-based practices, ambulatory surgery centers, and skilled nursing facilities. NQF has also provided guidance on how healthcare stakeholders can best report such events to help drive national improvements in patient safety. Read the 2011 report.
Focus on HARM (Harmonizing Accountability in Reporting and Monitoring)
NQF launched the “Focus on HARM” patient safety initiative in April 2024 to address the high rates of avoidable medical errors and preventable patient harms that continue despite decades of efforts to remediate these events. The initiative aims to improve patient safety and reduce avoidable harm by updating and harmonizing serious adverse event reporting and monitoring.
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