JULES STORR

Last week in Geneva the World Health Organisation Executive Board approved the “draft global action plan for infection prevention and control, 2024‒2030: draft global action plan and monitoring framework” and this will now proceed to the World Health Assembly in May for ratification by all WHO Member States. This very detailed action plan with its set of indicators, outlines a plan for countries and health care facilities to achieve the global vision that by 2030, everyone accessing or providing health care is safe from associated infections. A set of annexes go into the detail on the indicators and key players that will be instrumental in implementation of the plan once it has been ratified. There's a big focus on ensuring that in each country, IPC programmes are aligned with and contribute to other complementary national programmes’ strategies and documents, this is where the IPC-patient safety-quality-AMR interlinkages, relationships and collaborations (to name but a few programmes) come into play. The plan also addresses the need for political commitment, health worker knowledge, data for action, advocacy and communications, research and development and collaboration and stakeholders’ support. A theory of change is available. 2024 offers to be an interesting year for those working to improve infection prevention and control as one part of patient and health worker safety and quality.

It's good to shine a light on certain important interventions such as hand hygiene in healthcare, and this is why such days exist. WHO, with its May 5 annual campaign on hand hygiene in health care https://www.who.int/infection-prevention/campaigns/clean-hands/en/, and this complementary Global Handwashing day campaign. Both can and should work in synergy - and this is part of sustaining improvement. It's no accident that both campaigns occur in the months they do - May 5th (representing the 5 digits on a hand and reinforcing the 5 Moments) and October (tenth month, ten digits). Together, at the very least, we have a global focus on the fact that hand hygiene in healthcare and beyond remains a [patient safety] problem, not yet solved and that this focus occurs every six months can only be a good thing. Important not to overlook that from a patient safety perspective hand hygiene could be described as a modifiable behavioural risk factor for the development of a devastating and fatal healthcare associated infection. Finally, many people choose to use edutainment to promote better adherence with recommended hand hygiene. This paper that I prepared earlier with colleagues here and in Australia may be of interest to those considering developing their own edutainment approaches: https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(18)30575-3/abstract

Great point. Interested to hear others thoughts. Sitting here in the Patient Safety Learning conference today it’s clear we need both - exec leadership is critical for a safety culture (and this is of course backed up by studies), but growing acknowledgement of the importance of distributed leadership & role modelling and empowerment at different levels of a health system.

My first thought on coming to this community was, is it a bit abstract to be talking about leadership in a sub-community of a patient safety learning platform, when in the real world leadership is part of, or influences so many of the other sub-communities (culture, patient engagement, patient safety learning itself, to name but a few). However, I can definitely see the value in creating a special space to explore and stimulate some cross-fertilisation of ideas and learning on leadership for patient safety. It would be great to get some ideas flowing on how patient safety leaders across all levels of health care could use this community. I’ve found that leadership in the academic literature is sometimes a little vague, it’s common to see “leadership is critical for [X-aspect of] patient safety” written in various ways, but when you try and drill down on concrete examples of what that means it can be frustratingly non-specific. Could we start by stimulating some sharing of tangible real-world examples or vignettes that describe how leadership/leadership development is linked to making care safer or addressing a patient safety-related problem. This may mean infiltrating or drawing on some of the parallel discussions in other sub-forums and seeding the leadership angle into these discussions!