World Patient Safety Day 2026: The importance of patient engagement in safe care for noncommunicable diseases (17 September 2026)

Summary

To celebrate World Patient Safety Day’s 2026 theme “Safe care for noncommunicable diseases”, the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal speak with Professor Jose Valderas about the importance of patient engagement in delivering safer care. Professor Valderas is an academic family physician and Director of the Centre for Research in Health Systems Performance at the National University of Singapore. He is also the current lead for research at the World Organisation of Family Doctors (WONCA). He has led the development of tools to measure patient experience and outcomes, such as PREOS-PC and PaRIS-PQ, and has co-ordinated work with the World Health Organization (WHO) on patient engagement to promote safer care in primary care.