World Patient Safety Day 2022

WHO’s World Patient Safety Day’22 observed on 17th September aims to focus on improving medication safety. The European Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care (ESAIC) fully endorses this initiative and highlights that it first promoted medication safety back in 2010 as part of its ‘Helsinki Declaration on Patient Safety in Anesthesiology’, signed by all anesthesiology national societies in Europe and many countries beyond Europe’s borders.

Initiatives to further promote medication safety have been made since the Helsinki Declaration by ESAIC and its sister organization, the European Board of Anesthesiology, including through publications in the European Journal of Anesthesiology.

World Patient Safety Day 2022 Aims to Enhance Drug Safety & Other Safety Initiatives

Dr David Whitaker, European Board of Anesthesiology (EBA) representative in ESAIC’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee, and Chair the EBA Patient Safety Committee, Manchester UK, commenting on the WHO initiative, said: “Great opportunities exist to reduce and remove human factor errors in medication safety through better pharmacy procurement of safer, end-user friendly medicine preparations, avoiding preparations that look and sound alike, can easily be confused with others, using ready-to-administer prefilled syringes and standardization of work surfaces and medication processes.”

He adds: “Key factors around this that ESAIC would like to emphasize are that the manipulation of medicines in clinical areas should be minimized to avoid errors – ideally medications should already be prepared and require no further staff interventions. Injectable medicines should be presented as prefilled syringes, already labelled or as other ‘ready-to-administer’ preparations wherever possible.”

“All medications prepared for routine use in anesthesia, intensive care, critical emergency medicine and pain medicine should be clearly labelled. In addition, when drawing up medicines into syringes they should always be labelled immediately after filling before they leave the operator’s hand. Empty syringes should never be labelled. In combination, these interventions would reduce much of the avoidable medication harm we regrettably still see with injectable medicines today.”

While ESAIC welcomes the WHO project on patient safety, the society highlights that this is only one part of the overall patient safety picture and points to several other initiatives it has launched to improve all aspects of the patient safety continuum. Patient Safety is central to ESAIC’s core strategy: the society is dedicated to improving patients’ experience as they undergo care and reducing unnecessary harm wherever it occurs.

ESAIC’s Safer Care to Save Lives project is a comprehensive package of Patient Safety education for anesthesiologists, healthcare professionals, hospital management and patients, driven by the society’s Patient Safety and Quality Committee working with industry partners. The project was born out of extensive research. It is built on the principles laid out by the Helsinki Declaration, the Consensus Statement of the multi-Society Patient Safety Summit at the European Parliament in 2020, and the WHO Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum.

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Source-Eurekalert