Patient safety perspectives from other countries: introducing the WHO Geneva safe childbirth checklist

By John Tingle

Healthcare providers and policy makers can avoid the expense of reinventing the wheel if they try and look beyond their shores for solutions to patient safety problems. In the UK the work of the patient safety unit of WHO in Geneva helps NHS healthcare providers through the development of patient safety tools and other projects. The  WHO multi-professional patient safety curriculum guide is one example. The learning from error – video and booklet is another. Recently launched by WHO is the Safe Childbirth checklist and guide to implementation.

The Checklist will be a useful patient safety tool in developing, transitioning and developed countries. The scale of the problem is very disturbing. WHO calculate that in 2013, 289,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth, and 2.8 million new-borns died within 28 days of birth. Most of these events could have been prevented and mostly occurred in low resource settings. Women and their babies are being very conspicuously failed by health systems which should be helping them. Read More

Social Justice and Ethics Committees in Heath Care: Core to our Mission or None of our Business? Harvard Medical School’s 2016 Bioethics Conference

Register now for the Annual Bioethics ConferenceSocial Justice and Ethics Committees in Heath Care: Core to our Mission or None of our Business?

April 14, 2016

Joseph B. Martin Conference Center
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA 02115

This multidisciplinary program is co-sponsored by the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and the Petrie Flom Center at Harvard Law School to inform and deliberate with health care professionals, bioethicists, attorneys, and the public about how to address social justice issues in health care—such pressing problems as worsening drug shortages, continuing racial inequities, providing health care for refugees, uninsured and undocumented persons, and the like.

Using selected examples we will discuss the efforts of health care administrators and others to identify and address such large scale health system problems. Is there a role for ethics committees in handling social justice issues—should the attention of hospital ethicists and ethics committees expand to address broader institutional policies and programs? Faculty experts and participants will describe successful efforts to address specific problems and engage in thoughtful discussion with participants about strategies and struggles of ethic committees that move beyond individual case consultation to organizational ethics.

Support for this conference has been provided by Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.

Register at https://conta.cc/21ojHQQ

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