17.09.2024
“Get it right, make it safe!”
World Patient Safety Day is an opportunity to raise public awareness and foster collaboration between patients, health workers, policymakers and health care leaders to improve patient safety.
This year the theme is “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, highlighting the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.
A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health problem, and is a key to accessing the care and treatment they need. A diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient’s health problem, which can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.
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 predispose 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.
WHO will continue to work with all stakeholders to prioritize diagnostic safety and adopt a multifaceted approach to strengthen systems, design safe diagnostic pathways, support health workers in making correct decisions, and engage patients throughout the entire diagnostic process.
Correct and timely diagnosis is the first step to preventative interventions and effective treatment
Diagnostic errors account for 16% of preventable patient harm and are common in all health care settings. Diagnostic errors can include missed, incorrect, delayed or miscommunicated diagnoses. They can worsen patient outcomes and at times lead to prolonged or severe illness disability, or even death, and increased health care costs.
Understanding the diagnostic process is key to reducing errors
The diagnostic process involves many iterative steps, including the patient’s initial presentation; history taking and examination; diagnostic testing, discussion, and communication of results; collaboration and coordination; final diagnosis and treatment plan; follow-up and re-evaluation. Errors can occur at any stage.
A range of solutions are available to address diagnostic errors
Policy-makers and health care leaders should foster positive workplace environments and provide quality diagnostic tools; health workers should be encouraged to continuously develop their skills and address unconscious bias in judgement; and patients should be supported to be actively engaged throughout their diagnostic journey.
Diagnosis is a team effort
Correct and timely diagnosis requires collaboration among patients, families, caregivers, health workers, health care leaders and policy-makers. All stakeholders must be engaged in shaping the diagnostic process and empowered to voice any concerns.
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