DOHA: The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), a global initiative of Qatar Foundation (QF), presented early findings of research produced by its Leading Health Systems Network (LHSN) at the inaugural Patient Safety Global Action Summit 2016 in London last week.
The summit, co-hosted by the UK and Germany, brought together ministers, policymakers and healthcare experts from over 15 countries around the world to discuss how to improve patient safety.
In 2013, WISH led a major initiative on the critical issue of patient safety, with a research forum chaired by Dr Peter Pronovost, Director, Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins and Senior Vice-President, Patient Safety and Quality, Johns Hopkins Medicine.
The network has used the research as a springboard to launch further studies on how health systems around the world protect patient safety by reducing medical error.
Early findings, presented at the summit, identified gaps in patient safety in primary care, mental health and community healthcare.
LHSN will present its complete report at WISH’s Summit in November.
“This is a taster, a starter, if you’d like,” said Professor Lord Ara Darzi of Denham, Executive Chair, WISH.
“We’ve shown there are big gaps in identifying the right indicators that measure error in primary care, mental health and community services. This is an area that needs to be looked at. We’ve identified variations in where the data is collected in the acute section, between different countries. So we’ve identified big gaps, and a huge amount of error.”
The summit brought together ministers, including Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt, British Secretary of State for Health; Hermann Gr?he, German Minister of Health; Engineer Khalid A Al Falih, Saudi Minister of Health; Dr Ahmad bin Mohammad bin Obaid Al Saidi, Omani Minister of Health; Alain Berset, Swiss Minister with the Department of Home Affairs; Dr George Pamboridis, Cyprus Minister of Health; and Chee Hong Tat, Singaporean Minister of State for Health.
Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organisation, was also present.
Didi Thompson, Policy Fellow, Centre for Health Policy, Imperial College, and WISH Forum Fellow, presented the LHSN findings. Her research highlighted preliminary recommendations from the network’s work on patient safety information, drawing from case studies in eight countries in four continents, underscoring the global scope of the team’s work.
Egbert Schillings, CEO, WISH, spoke as part of an expert panel on ‘Learning from other industries and countries to improve patient safety’.
Copies of WISH’s reports on Anti-Microbial Resistance and Patient Safety were distributed to the delegates.The Peninsula
