Resources

The Global Patient Safety Report 2024 by the World Health Organisation (WHO) highlights the critical global issue of patient safety, recognising it as a key component of quality healthcare that still requires significant evolution. The report's main goals are to raise awareness of patient safety risks, provide insights into the scope of the problem and set the stage for global initiatives to reduce harm to patients in healthcare settings.  

Medication errors remain a stubbornly challenging issue in the provision of safe care. Although we often associate inpatient settings with medication issues, this comprehensive review studied the triumvirate of prescribing, dispensing and administration to determine common causal factors of mistakes and inaccuracies, leading to incidents in ambulatory and outpatient settings.

Outpatient safety receives a different level of discussion and focus than inpatient safety. We may not consider that outpatients can experience harm in the same way that inpatients can, which could reduce the focus on collecting accurate outpatient incident data. But even outpatient care can cause life-threatening harm, as this study shows.

What skills and experience do clinical governance or similar teams and units need to support your organisation's safety and quality agenda? In this webinar, Dr Sarah Fischer, Acting Executive Director of Safety at Safer Care Victoria, discussed the various roles and relationships to ensure fit-for-purpose teams.

Striking a balance between patient safety and professional autonomy is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted approach. Multiple challenges stand in the way of a balanced approach, such as...

Consumers’ perspectives and active engagement are critical to making health systems safer and more person-centred. Consumers, families, caregivers and the community can contribute towards improving care-related safety at the clinical (local), institutional (e.g., hospital, nursing home), community (e.g., primary care, home care) and national (in the development of national policies) levels of healthcare systems.

In this webinar, Sarah Fischer, Director of Culture & Capability at Safer Care Victoria discussed the elements that make up a safety culture; the steps to safety culture maturation, the signs that indicate success and how culture is influenced at a local level.

This comprehensive human factors resource will be helpful for those explaining human factors issues in human services, or designing healthcare systems and environments to support safe care.

Many years on from the Mid Staffordshire report, avoidable patient harm continues to occur in the UK (and the rest of the world). There continue to be new inquiries and reviews into serious patient safety scandals, all with recurring themes, including failure to listen to patients or learn from previous investigations, a corrosive blame culture, a lack of effective leadership and an unresponsive regulatory framework.

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports ‘To Err Is Human’ and ‘Crossing the Quality Chasm’ prompted healthcare leaders to address the patient safety crisis by advancing the systems, teamwork and improvement science needed to deliver safer care to patients.