patient safety Day 2019
The Patient Safety Day has a specific topic every year. The focus of the International Day 2019 was:
Safety culture at all levels
Patient safety is everyone's business! Each individual, each team and each unit can impact on safe patient care.
“We still haven’t managed to noticeably reduce preventable patient harm. There’s still a lot to be done!" said Hedwig François-Kettner, Chairwoman of the German Coalition for Patient Safety. "All actors must, within their remit, take responsibility for the development of an improved safety culture." On the International Patient Safety Day, specific initiatives will be presented to demonstrate how they can improve safety in hospitals and outpatient settings. Examples are activities in digitization and medication safety.
"Isolated individual measures bring only little improvement in patient safety" said Ruth Hecker, Deputy Chair of the German Coalition for Patient Safety and lead for Quality Management at the University Hospital Essen. “What's important is a change of mindset – everyone has a role to play in continuously and actively improving patient safety."
This year's Patient Safety Day is designed to help more and more people and organisations understand that patient safety is the ultimate goal. We welcome everyone who is taking the next steps with us towards an improved safety culture.
Purpose and Topics
Healthcare organisations, institutions, academic organisations, companies, patient organisations – all are invited to participate in this day with their activities and ideas, for example:
// Presentation of effective solutions to improve quality and safety in health care
// Raising awareness amongst the public and media on key issues relating to patient safety
// Information on activities in hospitals, care homes and general practice
// Information for patients on how they can contribute to their own safety
The campaign is an initiative of the German Coalition for Patient Safety, Aktionsbündnis Patientensicherheit e.V. (APS), and took place for the first time on the 10th anniversary of the APS in 2015. The Swiss Foundation for Patient Safety and the Austrian Platform for Patient Safety joined the idea at the time so it was a multi-country day of patient safety right from the start.
2015 // Prevention of Hospital-Acquired and Multidrug-Resistant Infections
2016 // Medication Safety
2017 // If silence is dangerous
2018 // Digitization and Patient Safety
2019 // Safety Culture at all Levels
Universitätsklinikum Bonn – 10 Years Institut for Patient Safety
Events on Patient Safety Day 2019
WHO campaign
We support the WHO campaign
The World Patient Safety Day builds on a successful series of Global Ministerial Summits on Patient Safety pioneered in 2016 at London as well as relentless advocacy by leaders from all sectors — politicians, patient champions, patient safety experts and global public health leaders. The establishment of an annual World Patient Safety Day will give an opportunity to providers, seekers and managers of health care services to join a platform and express solidarity and compassion to make health care safer. The origin of the day is firmly grounded in the fundamental principle of medicine – First, to do no harm.
The objective of the very first World Patient Safety Day was to raise global awareness about patient safety with the theme “Patient Safety: a global health priority”. Openness and ‘blame-free’ environments are the minimum conditions for enacting a safety culture. Hence, to promote open communication for learning from errors and to emphasize the importance of patient safety, the slogan for World Patient Safety Day 2019 is “Speak up for patient safety!”
For the very first time, on 17 September 2019, World Patient Safety Day was marked with events around the world to raise awareness of the need to establish patient safety as a global health priority. The day brought stakeholders together in an effort to reduce the unintended harm caused by healthcare.
Events & Lightening up monuments around the World on Patient Safety Day 2019
#PatientSafety #WorldPatientSafetyDay
Photo credits: © Nagwa Metwally; Yakob Seman; Joychakr; Nor’Aishah Abu Bakar; M.Zingl I Charité