Partnerships for safer health service delivery: Evaluation of WHO African Partnerships for Patient Safety 2009-2014

Summary

The African Partnerships for Patient Safety (APPS) is a WHO Patient Safety Programme concerned with building sustainable hospital to hospital patient safety partnerships. The programme is 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. It sits within the programmatic area of Global Partnerships for Patient Safety.

APPS is concerned with advocating for patient safety as a precondition of health care and catalyzing a range of actions that will strengthen health systems, assist in building local capacity and help reduce medical error and patient harm. The programme acts as a channel for patient safety improvements that can spread across countries, uniting patient safety efforts.

APPS has taken place in a dynamic context in which insights are emerging on multiple dimensions of patient safety in African settings and political changes have seen shifts in approaches to patient safety in the United Kingdom. What is clear however is that the published literature on evidence-based patient safety interventions in the African context still lags behind high-income countries. This report highlights that issues and solutions from high income settings cannot simply be applied to African countries, and there is a need to understand the insights presented here from front-line partners to ensure that culture and context are addressed and the necessary adaptation made to existing approaches moving forward.