WHO hosted an international workshop “Global patient safety: Perspectives from low- and middle-income countries” at the Second Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety on 29 March 2017. This workshop explored innovative, cost-effective patient safety solutions conceived in settings with limited resources. Key lessons were extracted, discussed, and summarized into three key political messages for health ministers.
The six presentations delivered during this workshop were centred on the following themes: driving improvements by strengthening leadership in Ecuador, evaluating effective improvement strategies for safer primary care in Kenya, engaging patients, families and communities in Uganda, building a competent and compassionate health workforce in Thailand, developing national patient safety systems in Croatia, instigating patient safety policies in Malaysia and extracting lessons from implementing the WHO Safe Childbirth Checklist for safer birthing practices in Sudan.
The discussions that followed explored more of an in-depth understanding of how to begin implementing patient safety strategies effectively at national level, and also emphasized the important role of patient engagement, and of sharing success stories and baseline studies.