12th - 13th October, 2009
Venue:  AIIMS, New Delhi, INDIA

It is a well recognized fact that patient safety is an essential precondition for any program that is aimed to improve quality of care. Unfortunately, adverse events during health care delivery remained a major concern. For example, Health care-associated infection affects millions of people worldwide, about 5% and 10% of patients admitted to hospitals in developed countries and more than 25% in developing country acquire these infections.

To address the aforesaid concerns the Global Patients Safety Challenge 2005-2006, a core programme of the World Alliance for Patient Safety, brings together the WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care with ongoing work on blood safety, injection and immunization safety, safer clinical practices, and safe water, sanitation and health care waste management.

The usual blame game over adverse events targeted against individual or product has not helped in reducing the risks. The current concepts of patient safety, instead of focusing on poor performance of individual providers, put great emphasis on deficiencies in system design, organization and operation.