PSMF names three new patient safety challenges

The Patient Safety Movement Foundation (PSMF) has named three new patient safety challenges at its mid-year planning meeting.

The meeting, which was co-convened with Inova, brought together over 100 medical experts, administrators, patient advocates and government officials from around the world for presentations and discussions on critical topics in patient safety.

Attendees voted to include the following three challenges as the next most pressing issues in patient safety: venous thromboembolism (VTE), mental health and pediatric adverse drug events.

The three new challenges will be added to the current list of 12 challenges and Actionable Patient Safety Solutions (APSS), and addressed at the Patient Safety Movement’s 5th Annual World Patient Safety, Science and Technology Summit in February 2017.

This year the keynote address was given by Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director for the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the US Food and Drug Administration.

“This was the best Midyear Planning meeting yet. We couldn’t be happier with the outcomes and are grateful for the participation and contributions of all those in attendance,” said Joe Kiani, founder and chairman of the PSMF.

“We are making great progress, but still have much work to do. Like the other 12 challenges we have addressed with our Actionable Patient Safety Solutions, VTE, mental health, and pediatric adverse drug events, have processes to prevent human errors from becoming fatal.

“But, these processes are sometimes made unduly complicated and significantly underused by hospitals in our country and around the world. We look forward to working with experts in each category to create easy to implement APSS for these new challenges. We firmly believe that if every hospital in the world adopts these APSS, we will be able to eliminate preventable patient deaths.”