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