The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) will attend the Second Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety, hosted by the German Federal Minister of Health, Hermann Gröhe, in Bonn, Germany, on March 29 and 30.
The summit is a joint initiative between the office of Gröhe and that of his British counterpart, Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, UK, to launch an exchange among their opposite numbers around the globe.
Last year, WISH presented early findings of research produced by its Leading Health Systems Network (LHSN) at the inaugural Patient Safety Global Action Summit 2016 in London, attended by high-level government ministers, policymakers and healthcare experts from more than 15 countries.
On the first day of the upcoming summit, German and international experts, joined by Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of World Health Organisation (WHO); and a representative from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, will address current patient safety challenges. The workshops will cover a spectrum of topics, including the economy and efficiency of patient safety as well as global exchange.
Many of these workshops will be facilitated by notable WISH community members, including Victor Dzau, president of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the WISH 2016 Precision Medicine Forum; Dr Donald Berwick, president emeritus and senior fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement; and Egbert Schillings, CEO of WISH. Additional issues such as mobile health and how to prevent and control infections are also on the agenda. On the second day, the attendees will discuss health policy consequences in a closing session moderated by Schillings.
“The fact that patient safety is an important issue in healthcare is not up for debate. We can all agree that it’s unacceptable that almost one in 10 patients are harmed while receiving care in hospital. For countries, patient harm also represents the most fundamental form of waste in healthcare; it violates all ethical codes of the professions involved, harms human lives, and, along with it, trust in the healthcare system,” said Schillings.
Patient safety is a core area of focus for WISH. In 2015, WISH published a landmark report on taking a systems-approach to patient safety; the research was headed by Peter Pronovost at Johns Hopkins University and specifically looked to the defence industry for lessons in safety applicable to healthcare.
For the past two years WISH, together with Imperial College London, has convened LSHN, a group of health systems in 13 countries committed to reducing harm through joint inquiry and mutual support.
Most recently WISH has published its LHSN findings on comparing harm reporting at a systems level, ‘An International Perspective on Patient Safety: What can we learn about measuring safe care?’, across systems in India, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, England, Scotland, and Singapore.
.
