Patient Safety Awareness Week

What is Patient Safety Awareness Week? 

Patient Safety Awareness Week takes place in March every year! This year it is being recognised from the 12th to the 18th of March. The purpose of Patient Safety Awareness Week is to promote healthcare safety education. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that hospitals in industrialised and developing nations account for about 2.6 million fatalities per year as a result of substandard care.

The Institute for Health Care Improvement intends to raise crucial issues locally and globally through Patient Safety Awareness Week in order to enhance healthcare safety for patients, carers, and healthcare systems as a whole. 

Whichever definition you use, patient safety is not something to be taken lightly. Everyone who works in a healthcare facility has a role to play in ensuring the safety of the patients.

When was it created? 

The National Patient Safety Foundation established Patient Safety Awareness Week, a seven-day event, in 2002. This yearly gathering was developed to encourage discussions about how healthcare systems may maximise patient safety. The public receives educational materials during Patient Safety Awareness Week to better prepare them to make knowledgeable healthcare decisions. According to a 2019 WHO report, one in ten patients in high-income nations experience injury as a result of inadequate safety in the healthcare system.

Why are we acknowledging it? 

Hollilander Recruitment is recognising Patient Safety Recognition Week because we think it is the ideal moment to emphasise the practises we require healthcare professionals to follow, whether or not they are our candidates. Here at Hollilander Recruitment we believe that even if you serve in a nonclinical capacity, we think everyone makes a contribution to a safety culture.

We take our commitment to our values seriously and live by them by acting with quality, integrity, compassion, teamwork, equity, and innovation. A potent method to demonstrate how we prioritise safety and how our principles support us in doing so every day is by participating in Patient Safety Awareness Week.

How can patient safety be maximised? 

International Patient Safety Week aims to advance patient safety by raising public consciousness and participation, deepening intercultural understanding, and fostering international cooperation and action.

The World Health Organisation has an incredibly informative article on their website, see below, in which the importance of Patient Safety is underlined for the purpose of the reader to understand.  

Patient Safety (who.int) 

We want to thank all of our candidates for their cooperation and hard work within the Irish healthcare sector all while maintaining patient well-being and safety.