African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) was a WHO Patient Safety Programme concerned with building sustainable hospital to hospital patient safety partnerships. The program was focused on countries of the WHO African Region but has also opened the network and programme resources to all hospitals in all regions of the world.

APPS was concerned with advocating for patient safety as a precondition of health care and catalyzing a range of actions that strengthened health systems, assisted in building local capacity and helped reduce medical error and patient harm. The programme acted as a channel for patient safety improvements that could spread across countries, uniting patient safety efforts.

APPS definition of partnership

Understanding and agreeing the meaning of "partnership" is a key starting point for all organizations and individuals involved in APPS to understand its role in the development and spread of patient safety in Africa. Partnership can be interpreted in many different ways and does not have a straightforward meaning. It is typically used interchangeably with collaboration, coalition and joint working.

In the African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) we have agreed the following definition as the foundation on which the programme is built:

Partnership is a collaborative relationship between two or more parties based on trust, equality and mutual understanding for the achievement of a specified goal. Partnerships involve risks as well as benefits, making shared accountability critical.

For more detailed discussion on the APPS working definition, download our brief paper: APPS partnership definition

APPS action for improvements

APPS provided a framework for action on patient safety that spans the components of a safe health-care system under the umbrella of 12 action areas (agreed by all 46 countries in the WHO African Region). The aim was for a simple, achievable, joined-up approach. APPS was concerned with stimulating action to result in quality and safety improvements that could be rapidly scaled up, building on a solid foundation of partnerships between hospitals across and between countries of the WHO African Region and beyond.