Get in touch with safety in health

Abstract

Keywords: Patient Safety, Quality and ProcessManagement, Simulation and Training, Health economicaspectsEditorialHealthcare systems have always striven to avoid errorsand to have safe procedures in place. The EuropeanCommission estimated that in member states, between8% and 12% of patients admitted to hospital suffer fromadverse events while receiving care [1]. In 1999, the pub-lication of ‘to err is human’ suggested a comprehensiveapproach in improving patient safety [2] and exploredthe need to enhance knowledge and tools to improvesafety. In the meantime, patient safety activities havestarted around the world [3]. Subsequently, patientsafety has received considerable attention and is fast be-coming an important research area [4].Patient safety is linked to human errors and the riskassessment approach of the aviation industry has pro-vided healthcare with some best practice examples ondealing with this systematically. For example, checklists,team training, and incident reporting have been widelyimplemented in healthcare systems worldwide. Follow-ing the introduction of the WHO-Surgical Safety Check-list by Gawande in 2009 several comprehensive studieshave evaluated its use [5]. The findings of these studiesindicate that even where there is an evidence-base dem-onstrating a benefit from the use of such tools, this doesnot guarantee acceptance and appropriate use by health-care professionals [6,7]. The reasons for this can lie in alack of positive role models, hierarchical barriers, limitedmethodological knowledge and inappropriate implemen-tation procedures [8].It is obvious that patient safety is linked to a broadspectrum of challenges and needs to include a varietyof interventions in order to succeed. The WHO and theEuropean Commission as well as other official bodieshave suggested implementing national strategies toaddress the key issues relating to the improvement ofpatient safety (Table 1) [9]. This includes fields of inter-vention such as organizational, policy and personneldevelopments, monitoring measures and measures toraise public awareness. Furthermore, within the health-care system we have to consider environmental, cul-tural, professional and healthcare financing differences.To enable these national strategies the establishment ofI. clinical risk management strategies,II. the implementation of health promotion schemesandIII. the development of safe and user-friendly systems,processes and toolsfor patient safety accompanied by information and com-munication technologies are needed [10]. All of thesemeasures will help to support comprehensive changes thatdevelop safe procedures in healthcare systems.Patient safety is an international imperative and is fun-damental to healthcare policy, planning, organization,delivery, evaluation and quality improvement. However,investment in patient safety research and outstanding re-search goals by healthcare organizations and by govern-ments are lacking. As described by Shojania [11], threedistinct achievements have to occur in order to showprogress in patient safety:I. Identification of interventions that reduce commontypes of adverse events,II. Dissemination of these effective interventions intoroutine practice, andIII. Development of tools to measure improvements inpatient safety issues.For this reason, the journal Safety in Health pays par-ticular attention to global trends in healthcare that affectpatient safety. The journal has four dedicated sections.Research in the section Patient Safety mainly focuses onstudies of patient safety showing evidence in implemen-tation and effectiveness in primary care, ambulatorycare, hospitals, care transitions at hospital discharge and