Patient safety

Overview of patient safety, quality issues & primary areas of concern

Patient safety

Infection control Medication errors

Documentation > surgical error

Patient safety?“Patient safety is the absence of preventable

harm to a patient during the process of health care.”

WHO 2012

Health care

Prevent harm Patients

Why?

Evidence of unsafe care!WHO summarized the current research into patient

safety and published the findings in a report which identified some key findings.

Harm Developed Countries Gaps

Patient safety research: an overview of the global evidenceJha A K, Prasopa-Plaizier N, Larizgoitia I, Bates D W

Primary areas of focus; patient safety

After orientating ourselves to the literature, we started to note and identify relevant topics that recurred in our searches...

The National Quality Forum in 2006 published a list of ‘errors’ pertaining to patient safety and called them "never events”.

Among the errors cited, were;

Other sources of patient safety problems resulted in compromised patient protection, adverse events involving devices/equipment and criminal events.

Hospital & community

acquired infectionsDrug errors Surgical errors

“The Mission of the High 5s Project is to facilitate implementation and evaluation of standardised patient safety solutions within a global learning community to achieve measurable, significant, and sustained reductions in highly important patient safety problems.”

-WHO (2012)

WHO (2012) is implementing the high 5’s project multi-nationally, focusing on similar areas to those we found to be of most importance through their predominance in the literature surrounding Patient Safety..