Liberia has celebrated World Patient Safety Day: "Recognizing the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety, Improving diagnosis for patient safety."
World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Matshidiso MOETI, says World Patient Safety Day allows us to highlight this important aspect of our work. It is celebrated every year on 17 September to raise awareness of the importance of people-centered care and preventing patient harm. Successive annual celebrations since 2019 have highlighted specific themes that represent a priority area in patient safety.
She said patient safety is a top priority in the WHO African Region and is inherent in all efforts to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The WHO Regional Director for Africa said resolution WHA72.6 and the Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030 highlight the need to ensure the safety of diagnosis processes.
She explained that the global action plan encourages countries to adopt strategies that reduce diagnostic errors. These errors often arise from a combination of cognitive and system factors that impact the recognition of patients' key signs and symptoms and the interpretation and communication of their test results.
According to her, a diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient's health problem. This can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.
She emphasized that the magnitude of diagnostic errors is profound, accounting for nearly 16% of preventable harm across health systems. She revealed that it is estimated that about 1 in 10 diagnoses is probably wrong, and most adults are likely to face at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime. She stressed that substantial work needs to be done to improve the safety of diagnostic processes.
She continued that in the WHO Africa Region (AFRO), several countries have developed and are implementing National Quality Policies and Strategies (NQPS), including patient safety action plans and other safety interventions such as Infection Prevention and Control (IPC), to make health care safer.
Dr. MOETI stated that WHO's slogan, "Get it right, make it safe!" calls for concerted efforts to significantly reduce diagnostic errors through multifaceted interventions rooted in systems thinking, human factors, and the active engagement of patients, their families, health workers, and health care leaders.
She said these interventions include but are not limited to ascertaining complete patient history, undertaking thorough clinical examination, improving access to diagnostic tests, implementing methods to measure and learn from diagnostic errors, and adopting technology-based solutions.
Meanwhile, she said that on the side of improving diagnostic services, the World Health Organization passed a landmark resolution on "Strengthening Diagnostics Capacity" in May 2023, emphasizing the critical role of diagnostics across all tiers of healthcare and urging governments to bridge existing gaps at the country level.
She said more practical initiatives are being implemented to improve the quality of diagnostic services. They include the WHO-AFRO developed Stepwise Laboratory Improvement Process Towards Accreditation (SLIPTA) program, meant to guide and help improve laboratory quality management systems (LQMS) in laboratories and prepare them for accreditation against ISO15189 standards, and a regional Microbiology external quality assessment (EQA) program that is a proficiency testing scheme on bacteriology and acts as a mechanism to give an independent evaluation of the accuracy and competence of laboratories in the performance of diagnostic tasks.
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She explained that this proficiency testing scheme covers basic bacteriological techniques, detection of epidemic-prone bacterial diseases, and antibacterial susceptibility testing (AST).
She urged member states to raise global awareness of diagnostic errors contributing to patient harm and emphasized the pivotal role of correct, timely, and safe diagnosis in improving patient safety.
She emphasized giving prominence to diagnostic safety in patient safety policy and clinical practice at all levels of health care aligned with the Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030.
