https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/poli...
The Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030 'provides a framework for countries to develop their respective national action plans on patient safety, as well to align existing strategic instruments for improving patient safety in all clinical and health-related programmes'.
'The purpose of the action plan is to provide strategic direction for all stakeholders for eliminating avoidable harm in health care and improving patient safety in different practice domains through policy actions on safety and quality of health services, as well as for implementation of recommendations at the point of care.'
The plan defines patient safety as “A framework of organized activities that creates cultures, processes, procedures, behaviours, technologies and environments in health care that consistently and sustainably lower risks, reduce the occurrence of avoidable harm, make errors less likely and reduce the impact of harm when it does occur.”
The plan has seven strategic objectives:
1. Policies to eliminate avoidable harm in health care
2. High-reliability systems
3. Safety of clinical processes
4. Patient and family engagement
5. Health worker education, skills and safety
6. Information, research and risk management
7. Synergy, partnership and solidarity.
I have not had a chance to read the 100 pages in detail, but it seems that the plan does not acknowledge lack of availability of reliable healthcare informationas a patient safety issue. This seems to be a major gap in the plan.
Strategic objective 5 talks of health worker, skills and safety solely in terms of awarneess of patient safety principles. I could see nothing about clinical knowledge and access to reliable healthcare information.
Strategic objective 6 talks of measurement, surveillance, health date. Again I could see nothing about clinical knowledge and access to reliable healthcare information.
Over two decades, HIFA has consistently highlighted how a failure to meet health workers’ needs, particularly their needs for reliable healthcare information, undermines quality of care and patient safety just as much as technical mistakes do. Over this period, we have been encouraged to see that patient-safety thinking has moved from “fix the errors” to “support the people who deliver care.”
Failure to translate evidence into policy and practice is a glaring cause of poor-quality and unsafe care and should surely be considered in a global patient safety action plan.
I look forward to hear from anyone who was involved in the development of the plan. What if anything can we do to integrate access to reliable healthcare information as part of patient safety considerations?
Best wishes, Neil
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org