As part of the UK’s Presidency of the EU, a Patient Safety Summit was held on 28-30 November 2005 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in London. This event was a follow up to the Luxembourg conference on the same issue, which resulted in the Luxembourg declaration.
Around 400 participants attended the event during the 3 days, including a high number of non-EU representatives.
The programme of the Summit was divided into three days. Day 1 focused on the extent of the problem and it included presentations from EU and US experts, individual patients, Wold Health Organisation (WHO)and European Commission (EC) representatives. The statistics presented that 1 in 10 hospitalised patients suffer an adverse event, and that 50% of them are preventable.
Not many references were made to the adverse events caused by medicinal products, which are also an important issue for patient safety, and do not necessarily occur during hospitalisation.
Although several presentations were made by individual patients or family representatives victims of adverse events, there were no views from stakeholders.
Mr Fernand Sauer presented an overview of the EC activities: the SIMPATIE project, cooperation with the WHO Alliance for Patient Safety, the creation of a forum with participation of all stakeholders and a stakeholders task force at EU level within the European Health Policy Forum.
Day 2 focused on the current actions that different EU and non-EU countries and international organisations are taken. It was interesting to see how other high risk industries (oil, aviation, etc) had managed to put safety first.
Although the media were mentioned, specially local or national newspapers reporting singular adverse events and medical journals publishing articles on patient safety, there was no mention to the role that media can play in the awareness raising of the risk that implies for a patient to use medicinal products.
Day 3 summarised the findings of the conference and called for politicians to take the agenda forward. It is expected that future presidencies of the EU will take up the issue of patient safety as a priority.
Launch of WHO Guidelines for Adverse Event Reporting and Learning Systems
At the Summit, the World Alliance for Patient Safety launched the new Draft Guidelines for Adverse Event Reporting and Learning Systems.
The guidelines are being made available worldwide to facilitate the development of new and improved reporting systems for patient safety The primary importance of reporting systems is to learn from experience and mistakes, and to use these results as a basis for implementing preventive action in the future.
The Alliance efforts in this area intend to facilitate the compilation and interpretation of international data on adverse events for early detection of potential problems and sharing of results to ensure that solutions are developed.
The draft guidelines aim to support countries to select, adapt or modify the recommendations to improve their reporting. The guidelines will undergo modification over time as experiences accumulate.
