Quality Improvement & Patient Safety

Patient safety issues are the avoidable errors in healthcare that can cause harm to patients. Harm in this context means injury, suffering, disability or death. Not all harm is avoidable. Some treatments or drugs are expected to cause harm, such as chemotherapies or certain drug therapies. Rare allergic reactions, for example, are "expected" in the sense that they will happen to a very small number of patients - we just can't predict which ones. But these are not patient safety issues. Patient safety improvement is about tackling the causes of errors in care that can come from working environments or training and support for staff.