World Patient Safety Day is an opportunity to raise awareness and foster collaboration between patients, health workers, policymakers and health care leaders to improve patient safety. Each year, a new theme is selected to highlight a priority patient safety area needing urgent and concerted action. This year the theme is Improving diagnosis for patient safety with the slogan Get it right, make it safer!, which highlights the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.
Diagnostic safety can be significantly improved by addressing the systems-based issues and cognitive factors that can lead to diagnostic errors. Systemic factors are organizational vulnerabilities that are likely to lead to diagnostic errors, including communication failures between health workers or health workers and patients, heavy workloads, and ineffective teamwork. Cognitive factors involve clinician training and experience as well as predisposition to biases, fatigue and stress.
On Tuesday, September 17, 2024, the Health Standards Organization (HSO) and Accreditation Canada join the global community in celebrating World Patient Safety Day with a special virtual event focused on improving diagnosis for patient safety. Quality & Risk Management encourage you to be a part of this crucial conversation driving the future of patient safety. Register now to secure your spot in this web event. Key topics include:
Navigating Diagnostics: Strategies and solutions to enhance diagnostic accuracy and patient safety outcomes.
Care Transitions: Best practices and research for managing integrated care transitions to ensure continuity of patient care.
Future of Diagnostics: Advances to health care that benefit patient care, including improved diagnoses and treatments.
If you are interested in attending but need somewhere to watch the event, please reach out to the Patient Safety Improvement Specialist, Terry Fodë, to arrange your attendance by emailing terry.fode@tbh.net or calling extension 6754 no later than Thursday, September 12 to sign up.