Global action on patient safety

The goal of World Patient Safety Day is to raise awareness and community participation, enhance understanding, and foster solidarity and global action among member states to promote patient safety.

World Patient Safety Day is one of the global public health days of the World Health Organization (WHO), which began in 2019 and is celebrated annually on September 17th.

The goal of World Patient Safety Day is to raise awareness and community participation, enhance understanding, and foster solidarity and global action among member states to promote patient safety.

World Patient Safety Day is a platform to promote global patient health and safety. It is built on the fundamental principle of medicine: "First do no harm."

The goal of World Patient Safety Day is to raise awareness and community participation, enhance understanding, and foster solidarity and global action among member states to promote patient safety.

Each year, a new theme is chosen for World Patient Safety Day to highlight an area of patient safety that requires urgent and coordinated action.

The theme for World Patient Safety Day 2024 is “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, emphasizing the importance of accurate and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving treatment outcomes.

Accurate diagnosis of a health problem is key to patients' access to care and treatment. Diagnostic errors are the failure to provide an accurate and timely explanation of a patient's health problem, which may include delayed diagnosis, incorrect diagnosis, missed diagnosis, or failure to explain the diagnosis to the patient.

Diagnostic safety can be significantly improved by addressing systemic issues and cognitive factors that can lead to diagnostic errors.

Systemic factors are organizational gaps that lead to diagnostic errors, including communication failures between healthcare staff or between healthcare staff and patients; heavy workloads and ineffective teamwork. Cognitive factors relate to clinician training and experience, as well as bias tendencies, fatigue, and stress.

The goal of World Patient Safety Day 2024 is to raise global awareness of diagnostic errors that contribute to patient harm and to highlight the crucial role of accurate, timely, and safe diagnosis in improving patient safety.

Emphasizing diagnostic safety in patient safety policies and clinical practice at all levels of healthcare, in line with the Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030.

To promote collaboration among policymakers, health administrators, healthcare professionals, patients, and other stakeholders in advancing accurate, timely, and safe diagnosis.

Empowering patients and their families to actively engage with healthcare professionals and health administrators in improving diagnostic processes.

The campaign's key messages are that accurate and timely diagnosis is the first step toward effective preventive and treatment interventions.

Diagnostic errors account for 16% of preventable harm and are prevalent across all healthcare settings. These errors can include missed diagnoses, misdiagnoses, delayed diagnoses, or miscommunication of diagnoses.

They can worsen a patient's treatment outcomes and sometimes lead to prolonged or severe illness, even death, along with increased healthcare costs.

Understanding the diagnostic process is key to minimizing errors.

The diagnostic process involves several repetitive steps, specifically: patient history presentation; collection of medical history and clinical examination; diagnostic testing, consultation and notification of results; collaboration and coordination among specialties; final diagnosis and treatment planning; follow-up and reassessment. Errors can occur at any stage.

There are several solutions to address diagnostic errors.

Policymakers and health administrators should foster a positive work environment and provide quality diagnostic tools; health workers should be encouraged to continuously develop their skills and address unconscious biases in judgment; and patients should be supported to actively participate throughout their diagnostic process.

Diagnosis is a team effort.

Accurate and timely diagnosis requires collaboration among patients, families, caregivers, healthcare professionals, health administrators, and policymakers. All stakeholders must be involved in shaping the diagnostic process and empowered to express any concerns.

According to statistics from the Vietnam Social Insurance, by the end of June 2024, the whole country recorded over 89.5 million inpatient and outpatient medical examinations and treatments covered by health insurance, an increase of 7.91% compared to the same period in 2023...

According to statistics from the Vietnam Social Insurance, as of the end of 2023, approximately 93.6 million people nationwide participated in health insurance, with a health insurance coverage rate of nearly 93.35% of the population, approaching the goal of universal health insurance.

In addition, the work of resolving and paying health insurance benefits has been carried out effectively. People's access to health insurance-covered medical services is increasingly expanding.

It is estimated that by the end of June 2024, the whole country had approximately 89.552 million inpatient and outpatient medical examinations and treatments covered by health insurance, an increase of 6.563 million people (equivalent to a 7.91% increase) compared to the same period in 2023. The amount of money assessed and paid exceeded 66.92 trillion VND.

The increase in the number of people participating in health insurance, as well as the increase in the number of health insurance-covered medical examinations and treatments nationwide, shows that the health insurance policy is heading in the right direction.

At the same time, it becomes a significant source of funding, contributing alongside the state budget to the effective protection and care of people's health.

However, this also increases pressure on the Health Insurance Fund management agency to ensure the fund's safety, with the goal of protecting the legitimate rights of health insurance participants.

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