A MENTAL health trust which was forced to review its practices after a string of killings by former patients had the second highest number of serious incidents last year.

A new report has revealed that, of the 53 mental health trusts in England and Wales, the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust was second from top with 262 serious incidents (SIs) in 2016-17.

Only Nottinghamshire was higher, with 303.

Other large trusts including Oxford, Sheffield and South West Yorkshire had fewer than 100.

The NHS has no blanket definition for an SI but they include “adverse events... where the consequences to patients, families and carers, staff or organisations are so significant or the potential for learning is so great, that a heightened level of response is justified”.

They include acts, or omissions, which result in unexpected or avoidable death, unexpected or avoidable injury resulting in serious harm, abuse, incidents which prevent an organisation’s ability to continue to deliver an acceptable quality of care, and incidents that cause widespread public concern resulting in a loss of confidence in healthcare services.

A spokesman for Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust said: “There is significant variance in the numbers of serious incidents recorded by each trust in this report, one reason being because each trust is different in size and serves a different number of patients.

“Another reason is because each trust interprets the NHS Serious Incident Framework differently and therefore records its SIs differently.

“Every year we see around 100,000 patients across our services and we are an organisation that is committed to learning from serious incidents. Our figures are high and reflect that historically we have recorded all incidents as serious incidents.

“However, last year we reviewed with our clinical commissioning groups (the NHS organisations that commission our services) our policy to ensure we are concentrating our resources on investigating the incidents which will focus on leading to the greatest improvements to the care we provide. This has resulted in a considerable decrease in the amount of incidents which now reach the agreed criteria to become an SI.

“We believe raising patient safety incidents and serious incidents efficiently encourages an open and transparent organisation which is keen to learn and improve and we encourage this among all our staff.”

In October 2016 the trust published an independent review following homicides involving “people known to its services”.

These include: Matthew Daley, who killed Don Lock in 2015; Kayden Smith, who killed Jen Janson in 2012; Graeme Morris who killed his mother in 2012; Shane Noble who killed Chris Poole in 2012; Sean Iran who beat Stefan Welch to death in 2009; David Sole, who beat Jon Ellison to death in 2011; Oliver Parsons who stabbed Jon Lewis to death in 2014; Roger Goswell, who killed his wife in 2007 then killed himself in a car crash; Steven Dunne who stabbed Gordon Stalker to death in 2010; and Christopher Jeffrey-Shaw who killed Mill View patient Janet Muller in 2015.

The trust is now implementing an action plan following the findings of the review.

Law firm Blackwater Law, which undertook the research, said: “The data shows significant differences in the number of serious incidents recorded by NHS mental health trusts with 25 trusts recording 100 or more serious incidents in the financial year 2016/2017.

Differences in the number of serious incidents recorded by each NHS mental health trust are to be anticipated due to varying patient and patient contact numbers, as well as variation in level/types of services offered by each trust.