(Ebook) Handbook of Patient Safety by Peter Lachman (Editor) ISBN 9780192846877, 0192846876

(Ebook) Handbook of Patient Safety by Peter Lachman (Editor) ISBN 9780192846877, 0192846876

Patient safety is a field with many moving parts. It cuts across disciplines,
professions, healthcare systems, business sectors, and governments. It
ranges from the simple to the complex, from the intimately personal to the
broadly theoretical. Perhaps more than any other area of healthcare, it
embraces multiple and sometimes incompatible models of management,
which have themselves evolved and changed over the years with surprising
fluidity.
This sprawling combination of the philosophical and the practical is thenecessary underpinning of healthcare. Without patient safety, medical
treatments lose their purpose. Care flounders and can become its opposite: a
source of harm. In all too many instances, in all too many parts of the
world, this occurs on a regular basis. As patient leaders in patient safety, we
are in a position to see the sad outcomes. For patients, safety can be
everything.
In spite of the fact that patient safety is a relatively young field, there hasbeen concern in recent years that it has ceased to be a priority of the
healthcare establishment, especially in higher-income countries. Several
global initiatives have aimed to reverse that trend, among them the 2014–19
Global Ministerial Summits on Patient Safety (interrupted by COVID-19 in
2020); the 2020 G20 Declaration, which names patient safety as a global
priority; and the Global Patient Safety Action Plan approved by the World
Health Assembly in 2021. The underlying concept is that healthcare must
be made safe if the goal of universal healthcare is to have real meaning.