Patient Safety
The WHO World Alliance on Patient Safety is a new, all encompassing project to improve medical care and is based on the World Health Assembly Resolution (WHA55.18) that urges Member States to pay the closest possible attention to patient safety.
Individual patients are the focus of this initiative and all countries are encouraged to develop systems to promote a ‘reporting and learning’ culture for adverse events in all areas of medical care, with a view to minimizing medical errors, therapeutic accidents and failures.
The WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring, with its long-standing experience in pharmacovigilance of medicines, will assist the Alliance in developing definitions of adverse events, reporting systems, tools for data-analysis, learning, communication and follow-up activities.
Working together, both medicines safety and the patient safety systems will improve patient care.