Dear HIFA colleagues,
Below are highlights from our discussion on Question 4. How can we better support patients and primary and facility-based health workers to deliver safe care?
1. “Patients should be empowered through health-literacy programmes, culturally appropriate information, self-management education and meaningful participation in care decisions.”
2. “Patients need understandable information about symptoms, medicines, warning signs, appointments, lifestyle changes and when to seek urgent care.”
3. “Health workers need continuous training, practical guidelines, adequate staffing, essential medicines and diagnostics, supportive supervision and safe working environments.”
4. “It's crucial to provide updated evidence-based protocols and patient-health provider communication skills at the primary and community level of health facilities.”
5. “Patient organisations are vital to ensure lived experience is heard, to equip people with tools for advocacy, and to help navigate complex treatment choices.”
6. “People living with NCDs can identify gaps that healthcare systems may overlook, including delayed diagnoses, fragmented referrals, medicine shortages, inadequate communication and unsafe transitions between hospital and home.”
7. “There is also now, thankfully, a great deal more understanding of the impact of error and harm on patients, families and healthcare professionals though blame and recrimination are still far too common.”
8. “Some organisations have active programmes to support all concerned after serious events.”
Regarding statement 2 and 3, the Global Patient Safety Action Plan emphaises the importance of reliable information for patients but ignores reliable healthcare information for health workers.
The section in the Global Patient Safety Action Plan 'Strategic objective 5. Health worker education, skills and safety' talks exclusively of patient safety principles and excludes clinical knowledge and availability of reliable healthcare information.
Indeed the basic needs of health workers [https://www.hifa.org/about-hifa/hifa-universal-health-coverage-and-human... are barely mentioned in the Plan.
I would argue that safe care is only possible when the basic needs of health workers are met.
This is perhaps implied in describing 'system factors' as being of primary concern (rather than medical error) but is not overt.
What more can we say about the role of patients in promoting safe care? What more about health workers?
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