Health
By Kennedy Nnamani
THE World Health Organization, WHO, on February 8, 2022, organized the 2022 session of the WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge in preparation for the 2022 World Patient Safety day, which is to be held on 17th September later in the year. The session, which was organized virtually also saw the unveiling of the theme of the year’s World Patient Safety, Medication Without Harm,
The organization has identified unsafe medication practices and medication errors as a leading cause of injury and avoidable harm in healthcare systems across the world.
In his address to the need for patient’s safety, Liam J. Donaldson, WHO Envoy for Patient Safety, emphasized the importance and the need to engage and prioritize medication safety noting that the challenge is essentially a program of change aimed at improvement and risk reduction.
He also underscored the need for medication without harm by aligning with the positions of Alphonse Chapanis, highlighting the sources of medication errors to include but not limited to medicine omitted, wrong dosage, wrong route. He also disclosed that in 2016/2018, 31 incidents of oral medication were given intravenously in the NHS.
Speaking on the need for the WPSD, Neelam Dhingra, WHO-HQ noted that the World Patient Safety Day creates global outreach and platform to highlight priorities in respective safety related areas of work and opportunity to advance safety in specific areas in health care as well as building partnerships and creating alliances.
On her part, Helen Hakell, WHO Patients for Patient Safety Advocate, who narrated the sad loss of Lewis, her teenage son to medication error, highlighted patient perspective on medication harm noting that minor drugs reactions can cascade into catastrophic medical harm because they are not recognized as such.
From the case of her son, Hakell made the following observations but not limited to:
Anyone taking a high-risk medication is a high-risk patient.
Patients can quickly become high-risk as their condition, healthcare workers caring for specialized populations like children and the elderly need expertise in specialized dosing, symptoms and vital signs.
The challenge whose goal is to reduce the level of severe, avoidable harm related to medications by 50% over 5 years, globally was launched on March 29th, 2017 with the objective of raising awareness of the problems of unsafe medication practices and medication errors, developing guidance, materials, technologies, tools to support the setting up of safer medication use systems for reducing errors, building capacities of health systems to reduce the risk of medication-related harm, empowering patients, families to become actively engaged in decisions, ask questions, spot errors, manage their medications, engaging and seeking commitment of key stakeholders, partners, industry to raise awareness of medication-related harm and support implementation of the challenge.
KN
Tags: Alphonse Chapanis Helen Hakell Kennedy Nnamani Liam J. Donaldson Neelam Dhingra
