World Patient Safety Day commemorated in Accra
This year’s World Patient Safety Day was yesterday commemorated in Accra with a call on health service providers to offer quality service to patients.
The Chief Director of the Ministry of Health, Mr Kwabena Boadu Oku-Afari, who launched the event, said medical negligence posed a threat to healthcare delivery since any such negative attitude could lead to prosecutions and payment of fines.
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“It is increasingly becoming clear that patients are taking more interest in defining and ensuring adherence to standards of care that they wish to receive from service providers.
“We, therefore, have to continually re-examine our quality and safety culture to respond to the complex needs of today’s patients,” he said.
The event, which was on the theme: “No quality, no coverage: Safe maternal and newborn care now,” was attended by stakeholders within the health sector who deliberated on promoting patients’ safety in the country.
Support
Mr Oku-Afari, who was speaking on behalf of the sector Minister, Mr Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, said his outfit would continue to support efforts of stakeholders in the fight against unsafe care and also provide the needed leadership to enable the country to attain universal safe health care.
Safety concerns
The Director-General of the Ghana Health Service, Dr Patrick Kuma-Aboagye, said the safety of patients, including maternal and newborns were of great concern to the service for which reason it had made effort to revise patient safety manuals for the implementation of a national healthcare quality strategy.
He said it had also renewed efforts to finalise a draft Patient Safety Policy, which was started in 2015, and expressed the hope that the process would be completed by the first quarter of next year to address contemporary quality and safety needs of patients and the complexities in the operations of the service.
Dr Kuma-Aboagye further said plans were underway to review the infection prevention and control guidelines of the service to include new evidence emerging from the COVID -19 pandemic.
He said the policy would link infection control to related patient safety concerns such as antimicrobial resistance and hospital acquired infections.
“Again, we have also set ourselves to streamline the metrics for the measurement of patient safety. This we hope will equip managers and service providers with the appropriate data on the status of patient safety while helping to identify intervention areas for partnerships,” the Dr Kwame-Aboagye added.
He commended partners, managers and service providers for their support in the fight against unsafe care, saying that their tireless contribution had been pivotal in improving patient safety and quality health care over the years.