Dear HIFA colleagues,
The Global Patient Safety Action Plan notes:
'Harm to patients cannot be corrected solely by urging health workers to be more careful... An alternative emerging approach in patient safety focuses on proactively making health care safer through an emphasis on *the conditions under which people succeed rather than fail*.' [my emphasis]
https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/poli...
Global Patient Safety Action Plan, page 2
It can be argued that a majority of health workers, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, are working in systems that set them up to fail. Worse, when failure occurs, the individual health worker often unfairly takes the blame.
On HIFA we regularly describe the basic needs of health workers.
==
Information is a key component of the basic needs of all healthcare providers. These needs may be summarised as:
• Skills
• Equipment
• Information
• Systems
• Medicines
• Incentives
• Communication facilities.
This spells the acronym SEISMIC - a seismic shift is needed to address the needs of front-line healthcare providers in low-income countries. For too long their needs have been ignored. We need an approach that is not only patient-centred but is also health-worker-centred. [4]
HIFA focuses on the Information needs of healthcare providers, but clearly the full range of needs must be met to empower healthcare providers to deliver high quality care, as described in HIFA's theory of change (HIFA Strategy 2025-2027, p5).
https://www.hifa.org/about-hifa/hifa-universal-health-coverage-and-human...
==
A safe healthcare system is one that is not only patient-centred but is also (importantly) health worker-centred.
Too often the needs of health workers are ignored.
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