Viewpoint: Patient safety in primary care - patients are not just a beneficiary but a critical component in its achievement.

Abstract

Promoting and maintaining patient safety in primary care requires different strategies and monitoring than utilized in large healthcare delivery systems. Maintenance of a culture of safety is key to providing patient safety but has been difficult to measure in primary care. This is particularly true in rural settings where practice size is a major barrier to measurement reliability. Primary care evaluates a wide range of patients, including those who are immunocompromised and others who have infectious diseases. Providing a safe environment with proper wearing of N95 masks, clean examination rooms, and adequate ventilation is important. Patients with infectious diseases should be separated from other patient populations. Primary care is often less bureaucratic than hospitals, but also has fewer resources to implement patient safety initiatives, along with detecting safety lapses and adverse events. However, monitoring the practice's safety practices and the culture of safety is of utmost importance and should be performed using both outcome and process measures. Because of the small size of many rural practices, effective monitoring of adverse events and maintenance of safety protocols should include patients. Patients are an important resource for reporting of adverse events and medical treatment outcomes. The aim of this manuscript is to underscore the importance of patient safety in primary care and to stimulate future research in developing a metric for the culture of safety in primary care, which also incorporates the patient perspective. Patients should be viewed not only as beneficiaries of patient safety but also as a critical component of its maintenance.