The World Health Organization holds a global webinar tomorrow, 9 September, ahead of World Patient Safety Day on 17 September. This year’s theme is safe care for people living with noncommunicable diseases.

Awareness days are easy to ignore, and most deserve to be. This one is attached to a subject that affects almost everyone who receives medical treatment, and the choice of theme reflects a real shift in where harm in healthcare now occurs.

What “patient safety” actually refers to

Patient safety is the field concerned with harm caused by healthcare itself, rather than by the illness being treated. It covers medication errors, healthcare-associated infections, surgical complications, diagnostic error, falls in hospital, and failures of communication when a patient moves between services.

The central insight of the field, established over several decades, is that most such harm is not caused by individual carelessness. It arises from systems: workloads that make checking impractical, handovers where information is lost, drugs with similar names stored beside each other, records that do not follow the patient. This matters because it determines the remedy. Blaming individuals produces staff who conceal errors; changing systems produces fewer errors to conceal.

WHO has consistently described a substantial proportion of harm from unsafe care as preventable, and has made patient safety a formal programme area with its own global action plan. The organisation’s framing is that unsafe care is a significant source of avoidable death and disability worldwide, and that the burden falls hardest on health systems with the fewest resources.

Why noncommunicable diseases

Noncommunicable diseases — cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, chronic respiratory conditions and others — are not transmitted between people and are generally managed over years or decades rather than resolved.

That duration is precisely why they create safety risk, and the reasons are structural rather than mysterious.

A person managing several long-term conditions typically takes multiple medicines prescribed by different clinicians, sometimes in different institutions. Interactions between those medicines become more likely as the list grows, and no single prescriber may be looking at the whole list. Long-term patients also cross more boundaries — between hospital and primary care, between specialists, between home and residential care — and each transition is a point at which information can be lost.

Diagnostic error carries a particular pattern here too. Once a patient has an established chronic diagnosis, new symptoms can be attributed to the known condition rather than investigated, a tendency clinicians themselves have written about extensively. The consequence is delay.

None of this is an argument against treatment. It is an argument that long-term care needs safety systems designed for its length, and much of it was designed around acute episodes instead.

The disagreement about how to fix it

There is broad agreement on the diagnosis and rather less on the treatment.

One school favours standardisation: checklists, protocols, electronic prescribing with automated interaction alerts, structured handover formats. The evidence base for some of these is strong — surgical checklists in particular have been associated with measurable reductions in complications across multiple settings.

The counter-argument, made by clinicians and by some safety researchers, is that protocols accumulate faster than they are retired, that automated alerts produce fatigue until they are dismissed reflexively, and that documentation designed to demonstrate safety consumes the time that would have been spent providing it. On this view, the binding constraint is staffing and time, and adding process to an under-resourced system makes things worse.

Both positions are held by serious people, and the honest position is that the answer probably differs by setting.

What this means for a patient

Patient safety guidance generally encourages people to participate in their own care, and a few things are widely recommended and cost nothing.

Keep an up-to-date list of every medicine you take, including doses and anything bought without a prescription, and bring it to appointments. Ask what a new medicine is for and whether it interacts with the others on your list. When leaving hospital, ask what has changed and who is responsible for your care next. If something does not seem right, say so — safety research consistently finds that patients and families notice problems that busy staff miss.

This is general information and not medical advice. Decisions about your own treatment belong with you and the clinicians who know your history, and nothing here should be used to change or stop a prescribed medicine.

Sources

• World Health Organization, World Patient Safety Day 2026 and global webinar scheduled for 9 September 2026
• World Health Organization, Global Patient Safety Action Plan and patient safety fact sheets
• Published literature on medication reconciliation, polypharmacy and transitions of care
• Published evaluations of surgical safety checklists and of alert fatigue in electronic prescribing