WORLD PATIENT SAFETY DAY 2024 | Get It Right, Make It Safe!
World Patient Safety Day, marked annually on 17 September, is an opportunity to raise public awareness and foster collaboration between patients, health workers, policymakers and health care leaders to improve patient safety.
This year the theme is “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, highlighting the critical value of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.
Why is Timely and Accurate Diagnosis of Essence?
A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health problem and is a key to accessing the care and treatment they need. A diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient’s health problem, which can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.
Diagnostic safety can be significantly improved by addressing the systems-based issues and cognitive factors that can lead to diagnostic errors. Systemic factors are organizational vulnerabilities that predispose to diagnostic errors, including communication failures between health workers or health workers and patients, heavy workloads, and ineffective teamwork. Cognitive factors involve clinician training and experience as well as predisposition to biases, fatigue and stress.
This year, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls for concerted efforts to significantly reduce diagnostic errors through multifaceted interventions rooted in systems thinking, human factors and active engagement of patients, their families, health workers and health care leaders. These interventions include but are not limited to ascertaining complete patient history, undertaking thorough clinical examination, improving access to diagnostic tests, implementing methods to measure and learn from diagnostic errors, and adopting technology-based solutions.
Key Campaign Messages:
- Correct and timely diagnosis is the first step to preventative interventions and effective treatment.
Diagnostic errors contribute to 16% of avoidable patient harm and are prevalent across all healthcare settings. These errors can manifest as missed, incorrect, delayed, or poorly communicated diagnoses. They can deteriorate patient outcomes, sometimes resulting in prolonged or severe illness, disability, or even death, and escalating healthcare expenses.
- Understanding the diagnostic process is key to reducing errors.
The diagnostic process consists of multiple steps, including the patient’s initial presentation, history taking and examination, diagnostic testing, discussing and communicating results, collaboration and coordination, final diagnosis and treatment plan, and follow-up with re-evaluation. Errors can occur at any stage.
- A range of solutions are available to address diagnostic errors.
Policy-makers and health care leaders should cultivate positive workplace environments and ensure access to high-quality diagnostic tools. Health workers should be motivated to continuously enhance their skills and recognize any unconscious biases in their judgment, and patients should be empowered to actively participate throughout their diagnostic journey.
- Diagnosis is a team effort.
Achieving accurate and prompt diagnosis necessitates collaboration among patients, families, caregivers, health workers, healthcare leaders, and policymakers. Every stakeholder should be involved in shaping the diagnostic process and empowered to express any concerns.
About World Patient Safety Day:
World Patient Safety Day was established in 2019 by the 72nd World Health Assembly through the adoption of resolution WHA72.6 – “Global action on patient safety.” Celebrated annually on September 17, this day serves as a vital catalyst for promoting global health and safety.
Rooted in the core principle of medicine – “first, do no harm” – its mission is to raise public awareness and engagement, foster a deeper global understanding, and encourage collective action among Member States to advance patient safety. Every year, a new theme is chosen for World Patient Safety Day to spotlight a critical area in patient safety that demands immediate and focused attention.
