ISLAMABAD: ‘World Patient Safety Day’ will be observed on September 17 (Tuesday), to raise public awareness and foster collaboration between patients, healthcare workers, policymakers, and healthcare leaders to enhance patient safety.

This year’s theme, “Improving Diagnosis for Patient Safety”, with the slogan “Get it Right, Make it Safe!”, underscores the vital importance of accurate and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.

The World Health Organisation (WHO), through its slogan, urges concerted efforts to significantly reduce diagnostic errors by adopting multifaceted interventions. These efforts should be grounded in systems thinking, human factors, and the active involvement of patients, their families, health workers, and healthcare leaders.

The interventions include ensuring thorough patient history assessments, comprehensive clinical examinations, improving access to diagnostic tests, implementing methods to track and learn from diagnostic errors, and adopting technology-driven solutions.

A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health issue and is key to accessing the necessary care and treatment. Diagnostic errors, which include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or the failure to communicate them, can have serious implications for patient safety.

Improving diagnostic safety requires addressing both systemic issues and cognitive factors that contribute to errors. Systemic factors include organisational vulnerabilities like communication breakdowns among healthcare workers or between workers and patients, excessive workloads, and poor teamwork. Cognitive factors relate to clinician training, experience, and predisposition to biases, fatigue, and stress.

One of the key objectives of World Patient Safety Day 2024 is to empower patients and their families to actively engage with healthcare professionals and leaders to enhance diagnostic processes. It also aims to prioritise diagnostic safety in patient safety policies and clinical practices at all levels of healthcare, in alignment with the ‘Global Patient Safety Action Plan’ (2021–2030).

The ‘Global Patient Safety Action Plan’ emphasises the importance of safe diagnostic practices and encourages countries to adopt strategies that reduce diagnostic errors. These often stem from a combination of cognitive and systemic factors, affecting the recognition of patients’ key symptoms and the interpretation of test results.

The scale of diagnostic errors is significant, accounting for nearly 16pc of preventable harm within health systems. With most adults likely to experience at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, substantial efforts are needed to improve the safety and accuracy of diagnostic processes.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2024