The World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH), a global initiative of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF), presented early findings of research produced by its Leading Health Systems Network (LHSN) at the inaugural Patient Safety Global Action Summit 2016 held in London last week.
The findings identified gaps in patient safety in primary care, mental health, and community healthcare. LHSN will present its complete report at WISH’s upcoming summit on November 29 and 30 in Doha.
The summit, co-hosted by the United Kingdom and Germany, brought together high-level government ministers, policymakers and healthcare experts from more than 15 countries around the world to discuss how to improve patient safety.
Established in 2009, LHSN has worked with 25 health systems in more than a dozen countries to help overcome the challenges faced in providing high-value care to the populations that they serve. LHSN is based at Imperial College in London and has partnered with WISH to improve healthcare policy around the world.
In 2013, WISH led a major initiative on the critical issue of patient safety, with a research forum chaired by Dr Peter Pronovost, director of The Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at Johns Hopkins. The Network has used that research as a springboard to launch further studies on how different health systems around the world protect patient safety by reducing medical error.
“This is a taster - a starter, if you’d like,” said WISH executive chair Prof the Lord Ara Darzi of Denham. “We’ve already 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 also identified variations 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 from seven different governments, including Rt Jeremy Hunt, secretary of state for health in the UK; Hermann Gröhe, Federal Minister of Health, Germany; Khalid A al-Falih, Minister of Health, Saudi Arabia; Dr Ahmad bin Mohamed bin Obaid al-Saidi, Minister of Health, Oman; Alain Berset, Minister with the Department of Home Affairs, Switzerland; Dr George Pamboridis, Minister of Health, Cyprus; Chee Hong Tat, Minister of state for Health, Singapore, and  Dr Margaret Chan, director-general of World Health Organisation.
Didi Thompson, policy fellow at Imperial College’s Centre for Health Policy and WISH Forum Fellow, presented the LHSN’s findings. Her research highlighted the preliminary recommendations from the Network’s work on patient safety information, drawing from case studies in eight countries across four continents, underscoring the global scope of the team’s work.
WISH’s research in the area has facilitated a global conversation around the search for solutions. Egbert Schillings, CEO of WISH, spoke as part of an expert panel on the topic ‘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 all of the delegates at the conference.