Your Excellency Dr Tawfiq Al Rabiah,
Your Excellency Sabine Weiss,
Your Excellency Dr Yasuhiro Suzuki,
Your Excellency, Secretary of State Jeremy Hunt, who I would like to thank for your great passion for patient safety,
Your Excellency Pascal Strupler,
Excellencies, distinguished experts, ladies and gentlemen,
It’s an honour to be in Jeddah for this very important Summit.
I would like to commend Your Excellency Dr Tawfiq Al Rabiah and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for your leadership, and for hosting this event.
Your country has made great progress in the past few years.
The launch of the Saudi Patient Safety Center is a very strong statement that you are taking this challenge seriously.
I also commend you for introducing the WHO patient safety curriculum for training health workers, your new medication safety programmes and the Patient Safety Friendly Hospital Initiative.
I would also like to recognize the Governments of Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and Oman for your leadership through the first three Global Ministerial Summits on Patient Safety, and the Swiss Federation, who will host next year’s summit.
For thousands of years, medicine has operated on a simple principle: either help, or do not harm, the patient.
That principle is as true today as in the time of Hippocrates. No one should be harmed while seeking care.
But unfortunately, we know this is not the case.
One in 10 people hospitalized worldwide experience a safety failure or adverse event.
Every year, an estimated 134 million adverse events occur due to unsafe care in hospitals in low- and middle-income countries, contributing to 2.6 million deaths every year.
Most of these deaths and injuries are totally avoidable.
These are not just numbers, they’re people.
Like Martha Murray, a young nursing student in Canada who was prescribed lithium to treat bipolar disorder.
But lithium can be dangerous for people who, like Martha, have a heart defect and low levels of potassium in their blood.
A combination of errors by medical professionals meant that Martha was prescribed increasingly higher doses of lithium.
She died of a fatal cardiac arrhythmia at just 22 years of age.
If only Martha’s story was an isolated incident.
But it’s not. It’s all-too common.
As you all know, WHO’s top priority is universal health coverage.
Our aim over the next 5 years is to see 1 billion more people enjoying access to the health services they need, without facing financial hardship.
That is the target we need to achieve if the world is to get on track and stay on track for the Sustainable Development Goals.
Patient safety is vital to achieving that target.
Expanding access to health services means nothing unless those services are safe and of high quality.
If health care itself poses a threat to people’s health, the benefit of increased health coverage is completely lost.
Unsafe care erodes trust in public health systems and deters patients from seeking care.
It can drive patients to the private sector, which they perceive as safer. This increases the financial burden on patients and undermines progress towards universal health coverage.
It also increases costs for health systems.
About 15% of hospital expenditure in industrialized countries is spent on treating safety failures. And the broader social and economic costs of patient harm amount to trillions of dollars every year.
Safe care delivers better outcomes for patients and their families, but it also delivers better outcomes for health systems by avoiding the costs of adverse events, prolonged hospital stays and compensation.
So in the end, safe care isn’t just good medicine, it’s good economics.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
We know how to make care safer. We’re learning from other high-risk industries, such as aviation, construction, railways and the nuclear industry.
As health care becomes more complex, we know that we need a more integrated, system-based view of safety. And we know that we need to address five critical gaps.
First, the “knowledge gap”. We need better data and research, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to understand the extent of the problem and the factors that contribute to errors and harm.
Second, the “policy gap”. Every country and facility needs clear policies on patient safety, adapted to the local context. That includes policies on reporting and learning from medical errors, and what to do about them when they happen.
Third, the “design gap”. We need to apply science to policies, strategies, plans and implementation tools to match the local context, particularly in low and middle-income countries.
Fourth, the “delivery gap”. Every health worker must know and understand the best practices, based on the best evidence, for keeping patients safe. And they must be supported by expert teams of trainers in patient safety and management science.
Finally, there is the “communication gap”. We need to bring together best practices and innovations, and we must share our experiences of what works, and what doesn’t.
That is why this Summit is so important.
Better data, clear policies, evidence-based tools, trained health workers and shared experiences.
These are five steps all countries can take to make care safer.
But there is one more: engage patients, and their families.
When people are empowered to take charge of their own care, when they are listened to, informed and consulted, when their needs and preferences are respected, the odds of errors and harm are dramatically reduced.
This is what we mean by people-centred care.
One way that WHO is helping to empower patients and their caregivers is through the new tool, “5 Moments for Medication Safety”, which we launched here in Jeddah just yesterday.
This tool is part of WHO’s Third Global Patient Safety Challenge, which is shining a light on a growing area of avoidable harm: medication errors.
To make it even easier to use, we have made this new tool available as a mobile application called “My5MedsafeMoments”, for both Apple and Android devices.
And as Jeremy said yesterday, just last month the WHO Executive Board recommended a resolution calling for an annual World Patient Safety Day on 17 September. That resolution will now be considered for adoption at the World Health Assembly in May this year.
And I want to publicly thank you, Jeremy, for your support for that initiative.
Once again, I thank Your Excellency and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for your leadership and hospitality, and I would like to express my respect and consideration to Tawfiq Al Rabiah.
WHO looks forward to working with all countries and partners to give the people we serve the care they deserve – safe care.
Thank you.