SafetyNet webinar | World Patient Safety Day 2024

What is World Patient Safety Day?

World Patient Safety Day, observed annually on September 17th, is a global initiative launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) to raise awareness about patient safety and promote actions to reduce patient harm in healthcare. Established in 2019, this day highlights the critical importance of patient safety as a global health priority and encourages collaboration among healthcare providers, patients, policymakers, and the public to improve improve patient safety worldwide.

Get it right, make it safe!

This year the theme is “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, highlighting the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.

A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health problem, and is a key to accessing the care and treatment they need. A diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient’s health problem, which can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.

Diagnostic safety can be significantly improved by addressing the systems-based issues and cognitive factors that can lead to diagnostic errors. Systemic factors are organizational vulnerabilities that predispose to diagnostic errors, including communication failures between health workers or health workers and patients, heavy workloads, and ineffective teamwork. Cognitive factors involve clinician training and experience as well as predisposition to biases, fatigue and stress.

WHO will continue to work with all stakeholders to prioritize diagnostic safety and adopt a multifaceted approach to strengthen systems, design safe diagnostic pathways, support health workers in making correct decisions, and engage patients throughout the entire diagnostic process.