WHO names new Patient Safety envoy

by Aimee Keenan-Greene

World Health Organization has a new Patient Safety envoy.

Director-General Margaret Chan has just named Professor Sir Liam Donaldson to the post.

Sir Liam, who served as England's Chief Medical Officer for 12 years, will help promote patient safety as a global public health priority and mobilize political support for WHO Patient Safety with health leaders around the world.  He will also advise the WHO Director-General on strategic issues in patient safety and propose strategic actions and collaborations at global level.

"We have come a long way in raising the world's awareness of patient safety, but challenges still remain," states Sir Liam. "Health care has not achieved the level of safety of many other high-risk industries. Citizens of countries around the world find it incredible that errors lead to patients getting the wrong operation or the wrong medication, sometimes with fatal consequences. Lessons need to be learned from such tragedies and action taken. The WHO Patient Safety Programme will be the cornerstone of a renewed effort globally to address these issues."

WHO says hundreds of thousands of patients worldwide are harmed or die while using health services annually. Their data indicates patient safety incidents occur in 4 to16 percent of all hospitalized patients. A recent WHO Report on the burden of endemic health care-associated infection worldwide estimates infections affect hundreds of millions of people globally. The burden is at least twice as high in developing countries compared to developed countries.  
Pear Health LLC of Rhode Island, who recently debuted The Patient Pod at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control (APIC) international conference in Baltimore, is addressing the challenge of hospital acquired infections (HAIs) with their unique new product.  The Patient Pod creates a new deployment system for patient safety. Developed by Fuzion Design Inc, The Patient Pod provides the bedridden hospital patient with improved hand hygiene while helping to prevent falls, needless use of the call button, and loss of must-have personal items like dentures and hearing aids - among other benefits. 

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say HAIs kill nearly 99,000 patients annually.

About the author: The author is in public relations and communications and is affiliated with the Pear Health Company.