Safe Care is the Right Care: ISQua White Paper on Patient Safety for Healthcare Organisations (3 April 2025)

Summary

Patient safety is the core foundation of healthcare quality. Unsafe care is a significant challenge globally, due to unsafe practices, processes, or structural inefficiencies within healthcare organisations, which in turn lead to patient safety incidents. This white paper from ISQua aims to address these challenging issues by providing a comprehensive framework to improve patient safety in hospitals and other healthcare settings.

Content

The white paper focuses on four foundation pillars that it identifies as critical for embedding patient safety into healthcare systems:

1) Advocacy and Leadership

• Advocate for prioritisation of patient safety within hospital policies, practices, and culture.
• Ensure that patient safety is embedded as a core organisational value in every level of healthcare delivery.
• Establish a strong hospital governance structure that ensures leadership commitment to patient safety and accountability.

2) Health Worker Education and Safety

• To empower health workers with the knowledge, skills, and tools to be proactive agents of patient safety within healthcare organisations through continuous education and training programmes.
• It prioritises the physical and psychological well-being of healthcare professionals to enhance workforce resilience to deliver safe and effective care.

3) Patient, Family and Carer Engagement and Empowerment

• To empower and engage patients, families, and carers in patient safety efforts.
• To ensure effective collaboration between healthcare providers and patients to improve safety and quality of care delivery

4) Improvement in Clinical Processes

• Adopt evidence-based practices to manage patient safety risks in clinical care.
• Ensure standardising care, utilising technology, and measuring progress and effectiveness.