This year, World Patient Safety Day is being held under the slogan A voice for the patient! The activities started a few days ago, among other things, several medical institutions organized an open day on Friday. The ministry announced that a special application is being prepared.
The red thread of the activities on Patient Safety Day is the effort to empower the patient by taking into account his voice, the Ministry of Health emphasized. With this aim in mind, they are preparing an application that will allow patients, relatives and medical professionals to report anonymously all the problems they have experienced during medical treatment. This will enable corrective and preventive action, and at the same time the application will serve as a learning platform for all healthcare providers, they stated in the press release.
The safety of patients is the responsibility of all those involved in medical treatment – it is the patients themselves who can significantly contribute to improving the safety and quality of healthcare. It has been shown that the inclusion of patients and their families in health care plays an important role in patient safety and contributes to greater success of treatment outcomes and, of course, greater patient satisfaction, the ministry emphasized.
Warnings that the relationship between fault and blame is not regulated
Also the general secretary of the Association of Patient Organizations of Slovenia Gregor Cuzak said at a press conference on Friday that patients can contribute to greater safety if they understand and agree to the therapy, as well as if they understand the diagnosis.
This does not mean that they become experts, but rather that they trust experts and sometimes point out unintentional mistakes – their role is thus not merely passive. “We know that when we are discharged from the hospital, the quality of our treatment also depends on what we do,” he emphasized. In this regard, efforts are being made to separate errors in healthcare from blame. “First of all, a mistake is an opportunity to admit it, but then it is an opportunity to learn something from it,” he emphasized.
According to his assessment, the data show that in Slovenia the relationship between error and fault is not regulated, as only 100 errors are reported annually to the Ministry of Health at the national level. Based on the number of health services, he said, it would be expected that 20,000 errors would be reported annually. Among them are cases of irregularities, but deliberate mistakes or negligence are very rare, Cuzak believes.
Several buildings and monuments will light up in orange
Before Patient’s Day, an open day was held on Friday in 14 hospitals and health centers in Ljubljana, Maribor, Novi Mesto, Celje, Koper, Nova Gorica, Murska Sobota, Jesenice, Golnik and Radeče. The common theme of all activities was patient empowerment.
Tonight, some bridges, monuments and buildings will be lit up in orange to mark World Patient Safety Day.
Source: Rtvslo
