Clinical Safety Case for AI Scribes

As AI scribes (sometimes known as Ambient Voice Technologies, or AVTs) are being adopted across the NHS at pace, understanding how to deploy them safely is more important than ever. Clinical safety compliance — specifically DCB0160 — is mandated for NHS organisations in England, and considered best practice across the rest of the UK, yet many teams find the standards difficult to navigate in practice.

To help address this, Newton's Tree partnered with Curistica to produce a guidance document with a worked example of what a clinical safety case for an AI scribe actually looks like.

This document walks through:

• What Ambient Voice Technologies are and why they carry unique risks
• What a Clinical Safety Case Report (CSCR) is and what it must contain
• A full hypothetical CSCR for a fictional AI scribe deployed in an NHS Emergency Department, built to DCB0160 standards
• A hypothetical serious incident review — including a patient safety event, root cause analysis, hazard log linkage, and containment actions — so teams can see how the framework functions when something goes wrong

Whether you're a Clinical Safety Officer, a digital lead, or a clinician involved in AVT deployment, this document is designed to make the mandatory standards more accessible and give you a concrete starting point.‍

Download the Example Clinical Safety Case for AI Scribes → here