WHO Quality of Care and Patient Safety Team Newsletter July-December 2025 Welcome to the December edition of the World Health Organization Quality of Care and Patient Safety Team newsletter.
2025 has been a time of change and restructuring at WHO, and our team now includes Quality of Care, Patient Safety and Infection Prevention Control. We look forward to working together to ensure quality and safe health services and care for everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Wishing you all peaceful holiday season and a successful 2026.
Highlights
World Patient Safety Day 2025
This year, World Patient Safety Day 2025 [https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-patient-safety-day/2025] with the theme “Safe care for every newborn and every child” and the slogan “Patient safety from the start!” was celebrated on 17th September. Key events included:
A missions briefing 8 September, engaging 32 Member States.A Global Webinar [https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2025/09/08/default-calendar/..., also on 8 September, with participants from 114 countries Launch of the World Patient Safety Day Goals 2025 [https://www.who.int/campaigns/world-patient-safety-day/2025/goals], aimed at supporting healthcare facility managers and health practitioners in addressing the major sources of harm in pediatric care. Spotlight on the WHO regionsWHO African Region
Improving quality of care to save lives in Sierra Leone - with WHO AFRO support, more than 500 health workers have received quality of care training to provide respectful, compassionate care for mothers and children. This short 2 minute video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYtfbdT5K14] provides an outline of the work which now sees all 20 of Sierra Leone’s district hospitals with a dedicated, salaried, in-house quality of care officer.
WHO European Region
Advancing quality of care in the WHO European Region through the 3rd WHO Autumn School on Quality of Care and Patient Safety [https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/events/item/2025/10/20/default-cale... This five-day course (20-24th October) focused on 2 core pillars: delivering outcomes that matter to patients and communities, and adopting a systems approach to quality of care, supported by strong governance and an adaptive health workforce.
Simulation for Patient Safety Initiative: A regional survey and focus group discussions were undertaken to identify variations in simulation practices and organizational enablers and barriers for simulation practices to advance patient safety .
The 2nd WHO Autumn School on Quality of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Care [https://www.who.int/europe/news-room/events/item/2025/11/03/default-cale... brought together early-career professionals from ministries of health in Greece, neighbouring southern European countries and the Western Balkans. The course aimed to strengthen practical skills., fostering capacity-building through mix of small-group, problem-based learning, real-world case studies, and peer-to-peer exchange.
WHO South-East Asia Region
Compendium of best practices and case studies in quality of care, patient safety, infection prevention and control in lower- and middle-income countries - the compendium [https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/380849] is a peer-reviewed collection of best practices and case studies on quality of care, IPC and patient safety plays a central role in disseminating knowledge, facilitating learning, and driving improvement particularly in Member States of the South-East Asia Region.
WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region
UAE MOHAP support: WHO assisted in rolling out the institutionalization of the Patient Safety Friendly Hospital Framework through a three-day TOT workshop to build a group of national assessors, followed by the external evaluation of two general hospitals.
Qatar conference (WPSD 2025): WHO contributed to the national event celebrating World Patient Safety Day, presenting work on the development and implementation of a national quality improvement project.
Operational updates included the implementation of QI in 36 hospitals across different provinces in Afghanistan.
Learning opportunities
The Global Patient Safety Collaborative (GPSC) webinar series:
The 13th GPSC webinar on Patient Safety Incident Reporting and Learning Systems (PSIRLS) was held on 23rd September 2025, and had 60 participants. The webinar provided an overview of PSIRLS, disseminated WHO guidance and resources, shared experience from the UK and Ireland on the establishment of PSIRLS, and provided an opportunity for the six countries receiving direct support from the GPSC to share their progress and discuss next steps in implementing PSIRLS.
The 14th webinar on Legislation for Quality of Care and Patient Safety took place on 10th December 2025 with around 45 participants. The webinar provided an overview of the different types of legislation that enshrine patient safety in the legal frameworks of different countries, and shared insight from country experiences. The Governance, Law and Reforms department at WHO HQ provided insight into the development and enforcement of legislation for safer health systems. We heard from the UK and Sri Lanka about integrating patient and community voices in patient safety and quality of care legislation, from Saudi Arabia about designing laws and from Argentina and Kenya about lessons learned in the development and adoption of national law.
The Quality of Care and Patient Safety Education and Training Network (QPSET) held the final meeting of 2025 with 49 participants, to share updates on the development of the network and the workplan for 2026. A rapid review of quality improvement and patient safety training curricula was presented by Greece, and the progress on the development of the WHO Academy Patient Safety Essentials Course was presented by WHO HQ. Round table updates were shared by all members.
New WHO publications
Compendium on respectful maternal and newborn care [https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240110939]: Bring together key evidence, tools and resources to support the practical implementation of respectful maternal and newborn care across different contexts. It provides programme managers with essential background to build a foundational understanding of mistreatment and respectful care.
Development and implementation of national action plans for infection prevention and control: practical guide : [https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/381706/9789240111943-eng.pdf... The guide, the result of a collaboration across all three levels of WHO aims to provide a practical, stepwise approach to the development and implementation of national action plans (NAPs) for infection prevention and control (IPC), aligned with the WHO global action plan and monitoring framework on IPC. The guide includes inspirational country stories and directs users towards tools and resources to help countries to prioritize, cost, implement, monitor and evaluate their NAP activities.
Child and youth mental health in the WHO European Region [https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/WHO-EURO-2025-12824-52598... A summary of the data available at regional level on child ad youth mental health, with a short Factsheet [https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/WHO-EURO-2025-10632-50404... also available.
Quality standards for child and youth mental health service [https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/WHO-EURO-2025-11318-51090... The standards outline an aspirational but achievable definition of high-quality care and provide a basis to assess and identify areas for improvement for the quality of specialised child and youth mental health services.
Rapid assessment of the quality of mental health care in Greece [https://www.who.int/europe/publications/i/item/WHO-EURO-2025-12137-51909... WHO assessment team interviewed a wide range of Greek mental health stakeholders and visited mental health services to understand the data and indicators collected by mental health service providers and stakeholders’ perception on quality of care. The findings highlighted challenges in data collection and revealed an overall positive attitude towards quality of care, forming the basis for a proposed framework of measuring quality of care indicators and quality improvement initiatives for mental health services in Greece.
WHO authored recently published journal articles
Quality of care in an era of global challenges: A transformational vision for WHO European Region and beyond | European Journal of Public Health | Oxford Academic [https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurpub/ckaf2...
Developing and evaluating a proof-of-concept patient safety training programme for health workers in North Macedonia | BMJ Open Quality [https://bmjopenquality.bmj.com/content/14/3/e003473]
Case for Strengthening Infection Prevention and Control in Primary Care | The Journal of Infectious Diseases | Oxford Academic [https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/232/Supplement_2/S140/8259932]
Tracing harm, driving change: how frontline risks inform systemic quality and safety policies - PubMed [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40906633/]
What Do We Know About Contemporary Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Training Curricula in Health Workers? A Rapid Scoping Review | MDPI [https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/13/12/1445]
Improving the quality of chronic care through purchasing arrangements in resource-constrained settings: insights from an international Delphi survey [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16549716.2025.2518667]
WHO global research agenda for hand hygiene improvement in health care: a Delphi consensus study. - Abstract - Europe PMC [https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC7617569]
Advancing the quality of maternal, newborn, and child healthcare: insights from pilot hospitals in the Kyrgyz Republic [https://jogh.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/jogh-15-04256.pdf]
Understanding the development and implementation of national quality of care and patient safety strategic documents: a scoping review - PubMed [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41310647/]
Development of methods for WHO quality standards for child and youth mental health services to improve quality of care and patient safety in the WHO European region - PMC [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12528165/]
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