Under the patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the fourth Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety concluded in Jeddah today (Sunday). The summit issued "Jeddah Declaration", which provides for the followings:
The Jeddah Declaration for Patient Safety 2019 endorses the points established by the Tokyo Declaration on Patient Safety presented at the Third Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety, 14 April 2018, Tokyo, Japan.
In view of this call for action, the parties to this agreement declare to:
1- Promote patient safety in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC). According to the World Health Organization (WHO), each year, unsafe care in LMIC results in 134 million adverse events, contributing to 2.6 million deaths annually. Hence, it is important to encourage countries throughout the world, to work closely with LMIC to promote patient safety in these countries.
As part of its contribution to the pressing global health demands, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has committed to a patient safety outreach initiative to promote safety and work on setting patient safety research priorities with special emphasis on LMIC.
2- Utilize digital health to support patient safety across the globe. Saudi Arabia is proposing the launch of a virtual platform to help the collaboration between healthcare professionals from High Income Countries & LMICs. This digital platform will provide technical support for healthcare professionals.
3- Promote patient empowerment & community engagement for patient safety. To encourage countries to adopt practical empowerment strategies for patients and families. Such strategies would highlight the principles of co-production for example through strengthening health literacy and endorsing, implementing and reinforcing Patient Centered Root Cause Analysis (Patient Centered RCA).
4- Leverage the ICD through the creation of ICAE for Patient Safety to improve our understanding of the magnitude of Adverse Events (AEs), and to promote better International Classification of Diseases (ICD) - implemented globally, we recommend leveraging ICD development process to establish the ICAE (International Classification of Adverse Events) which would help with standardization of the taxonomy of adverse events.
5- Implement and sustain National Reporting & Learning Systems for Patient Safety. Emphasizing the importance of countries establishing their Reporting & Learning Systems (institutional, local, national and/or global) for Adverse Events. Such systems should promote standardization through the presence of unified taxonomy (Nomenclature) for adverse events.
6- Invest on workforce knowledge and safety as the drivers for patient safety. Workforce Safety (Physical & Psychological) is paramount to patient safety. Hence, it’s important that countries adopt national policies addressing the following:
- Second Victims: to be supported by relevant departments within hospitals (healthcare facilities).
- Appropriate Nursing Staffing & Skill Mix in hospitals.
- Undergraduate curriculum for Medical, Nursing, Dental and Allied Health Sciences (and related) degrees to include a patient safety and improvement.
- Using innovative approaches for training of health professionals such as Inter Professional Education.
7- Learn from other industries to encourage countries to learn from best practices in safety from other industries (Aviation, Nuclear, Oil / Gas, Aerospace, Auto). Hence, the Saudi Patient Safety Center (SPSC) is launching a safety collaborative program, which includes safety experts from various industries (healthcare + others) to work on mutual collaborations for collective safety improvement in all sectors.
8- Promote medication safety in community pharmacies. To promote the implementation of the 3rd Global Patient Safety Challenge: medication without harm, in community pharmacies. Such move would help improve medication safety as well as strengthening the efforts of patient empowerment and community engagement.
9- Consider medical devices and human interface as crucial factor for patient safety. To encourage countries to adopt human factors engineering (HFE) strategies to introduce resilience and minimize medical devices related adverse events.
10- Enforce Infection Prevention Control (IPC) & Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) strategies for patient safety. To promote antimicrobial stewardship, especially policies that prohibit access to antibiotics without prescription in LMIC. Also, to continuously encourage healthcare professionals’ compliance with hand hygiene while providing care.
11- To reduce the 2nd Translational Gap by supporting implementation and sustainable scale-up of patient safety interventions of known efficacy/effectiveness at national and global level.
Patient safety has moved from an evidence gap 20 years ago to an implementation gap currently in order to transform patient safety over the next 20 years, it is imperative that healthcare systems focus on implementation strategies to reduce the so called "2nd translational gap", thereby maximizing the added value of the expansive evidence base on patient safety.
On his part the Health Minister Dr. Tawfiq Al-Rabiah said, "Although patient safety has been on the forefront of public health policy makers’ priorities since the beginning of the last century, still more international focus, research and debate is needed to improve patient safety. There have been very limited opportunities for international experts to engage with Ministers of Health and other high-ranking political decision-makers for effective collaboration between countries".
The apparent risk in healthcare has led many countries to invest in several measures to strengthen their healthcare systems and improve patient safety. Efforts were initiated in 2015, which culminated in the launch of the Global Ministerial Patient Safety Summit series, with the first summit being held in London in 2016, followed by Bonn in 2017 and Tokyo in 2018, where international experts engaged with policymakers to promote and sustain a collaborative approach to improve patient safety, globally.
The Jeddah Declaration on Patient Safety is founded on the principles that guided the 4th Global Ministerial Patient Safety Summit 2019, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which in turn, sets recommendations for international standards, guidelines and actions that aim to address patient safety issues of global significance, with a strong emphasis on LMIC. The Summit is thus establishing patient safety as a crucial principle integrated on the efforts to achieve universal health coverage (UHC).
The Jeddah Declaration on Patient Safety is a call for action on many fronts, and for many actors, at all levels of healthcare provision and delivery – from frontline, to organizational and policy arenas.
The Declaration is founded on the underlying spirit that it is imperative to reflect on the effectiveness of current practices in light of the now mature patient safety evidence base of 20 years; and to collectively move forward with a vision to sustainable and scalable implementation of patient safety solutions known to improve care delivery systems, patient outcomes, and safety culture.
The Declaration signals a strong collective and global commitment to shape truly safer systems for generations to come.