65th WHA Technical session on Patient Safety

Salle IX, Palais des Nations, Wednesday 23 May 2012, from 12:30-14:00. The technical session, hosted by the Supreme Council of Health, Qatar, will focus on the successes and lessons learned from the implementation of global and national patient safety programmes in the past decade. It will also look at new ways of moving forward to strengthen existing national efforts, while intensifying further global patient safety actions and the development of interventions.

WHA delegates are encouraged to participate and share their knowledge and experiences about how to achieve quality and safety in health service delivery. A light lunch will be available at 12:00 just outside the meeting room.

• Briefing_note
  pdf, 58kb
• Agenda
  pdf, 75kb
• Link to the 65th World Health Assembly documents, 21-26 May 2012

Every 5 May, WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands global campaign aims to maintain a global profile on the importance of hand hygiene in health care to reduce health care-associated infections. These infections affect hundreds of millions of patients around the world every year. WHO SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands was launched in 2009 and to date has gathered registrations from 15 000 health-care facilities from the majority of WHO Member States, demonstrating commitment to improving patient safety through clean hands. WHO's specific Call to Action for 5 May 2012 is for health-care facilities to prepare action plans for hand hygiene improvement and involve all staff and health-care facility leaders.

• Read More on SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands - 5 may 2012

Results from the Easter Mediterranean/African Adverse Events Study reveals that patients are suffering preventable permanent disability or died due to unsafe health care in developing and transitional countries. On average, health-care related harmful incidents affected 8 in 100 of the patients studied. These are conservative estimates that only show the tip of the iceberg. This evidence highlights the importance of addressing patient safety globally.

• Read more about the burden of unsafe care

WHO Patient Safety recently launched a book, "The evolving threat of antimicrobial resistance - Options for action". It describes examples of policy activities that have addressed antimicrobial resistance in different parts of the world with the aim of raising awareness and in particular to stimulate further coordinated efforts. A crisis has been building up over decades, so that today common and life-threatening infections are becoming difficult or even impossible to treat. It is time to take much stronger action worldwide to avert an ever-increasing health and economic burden.

• Launching the book on AMR interventions
• The evolving threat of antimicrobial resistance - Options for action