(WHO) Patient Safety Curriculum Guide - CAIPE

World Medical Association
Safety is a cornerstone of quality in health care and its success requires individual
and team commitment. Individuals and processes are rarely single causes of errors.
Rather, separate elements combine and together produce high-risk situations.
Understanding risk in the complex processes of health and medical care requires
information about errors and so-called near misses. From them we can learn to close
gaps of safety, reduce morbidity, mortality and to raise the quality of health care.
Therefore, it is crucial to have a non-punitive safety culture to deal with errors, with
reporting mechanisms that help prevent and correct system failures and human
errors instead of seeking individual or organizational culpability. In most health-care
settings this blame-free culture still needs to be developed. One crucial step in this
process is to educate health professional students on the concept of safety in health
care, collaborative practice and how to implement it in their future day-to-day work.
Person-centred health care is becoming more complex and more specialised. This
requires that more attention is paid to seamless teamwork in health care. A truly
collaborative practice demands a high degree of communication, accurate passing
on of task and results and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. A realistic
understanding of the risks inherent in modern medicine makes it necessary that all
health professionals are capable of cooperating with all relevant parties, of adopting
a proactive systems approach to safety and of performing with professional
responsibility. This includes first and foremost the dialogue with our patients and to
pay respect to their needs, expectations, fears and hopes.
The World Medical Association advocates health professionals to recognize safety as
one of the core elements for improving quality in health care. Facilitating the
development of collective knowledge about unsafe situations and practices and
taking preventive action to avoid unnecessary risks is key to success.
The WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide offers an educational tool for students of
health professions to understand the concept of patient safety and collaborative
practice. It gives guidance to teachers on how to teach this topic with modern
educational methods.
Dr Wonchat Subhachaturas
President
World Medical Association
WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide: Multi-professional Edition
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