GoingToMeet

Over the last few years patient safety has gone from being a marginal issue that was often neglected to one of the highest priority issues in modern healthcare. There is now much greater awareness of patient safety issues among clinicians, managers and policymakers and the levels of incident reporting have dramatically increased.

All this is good news, but things are not changing as fast as they need to. Much progress has been made in defining the types of intervention that work, and some organisations are already showing impressive improvements. However, this learning is not being transferred quickly enough and we do not yet see the large scale change required.

This important new event forms a call to action for all to take patient safety seriously. We need to move on to the next level and mainstream use of the tools and information available, to dramatically reduce the risk of harm to patients across the NHS. What has become clear is that patient safety is everyone’s responsibility, and across its five dedicated streams, the Patient Safety Congress has something for everyone, including: Policy discussion, practical training on delivering frontline improvements, case studies of excellence and inspirational presentations from the leading international figures in patient safety and quality improvement.