How to do no harm: empowering local leaders to make care safer in low-resource settings (11 February 2021)

Summary

Patient safety is a key goal of the WHO as a central component of high-quality health systems. Increasing efforts have been made to improve quality of care in low-resource settings but identifying harms and developing strategies to deliver safe care has been given less attention.

Charles Vincent and colleagues describe a ‘portfolio’ approach to safety improvement in four broad categories: prioritising critical processes, improving the organisation of care, control of risks and enhancing responses to hazardous situations that they believe is relevant to low-resource settings.

They consider how practitioners, especially those in low-resource setting hospitals, might employ these strategies and focus attention on the possible roles of practitioner groups and professional associations as key to advancing patient safety through collaboration and skill development in this field.