WHO Global Patient Safety Challenge
The World Health Organization (WHO) launched the third Global Patient Safety Challenge in 2017 with the theme of medication without harm. Our response highlights Australia's goal to reduce medication errors, adverse drug events and medication-related harm.
Harm due to medicines and therapeutic options make up nearly 50% of overall preventable harm in medical care.
The World Health Organization (WHO) launched the third Global Patient Safety Challenge in 2017 to address medication-related harm globally over the next five years.
The three focus areas of the Global Patient Safety Challenge are reducing harm from:
- high-risk situations
- polypharmacy and
- transitions of care.
Australia’s response to the Global Patient Safety Challenge
We were engaged to develop Australia’s response to the challenge.
The response includes recommendations and priority action areas to reduce medication errors, adverse drug events and medication-related harm, and includes recommendations to meet the three focus areas of the challenge.
Status report on Australia's response
Our status report uses data until June 2023 to examine achievements against the recommendations in Australia’s response.
Our status report looks at the impact of programs we implemented to address:
- monitoring polypharmacy and responding to inappropriate polypharmacy
- reducing harm from high-risk medicines, with focus on insulin, opioid analgesics, anticoagulants and antipsychotics
- improving medication safety at transitions of care.
Our priority action status summary gives an overview of our achievements and uses the Traffic Light Method to show the progress of current activities and priority areas we identified in Australia’s response.