Safe care for every newborn and every child

The College’s Patient Safety Group (PSG) is delighted to lend our enthusiastic support to the seventh World Patient Safety Day (WPSD). This event, established by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2018, takes place on 17 September. It helps to raise global awareness among all stakeholders about key patient safety issues and foster collaboration between patients, healthcare workers, leaders and policymakers to improve patient safety. Each year a new theme is selected to highlight a priority patient safety area requiring concerted effort.

This year’s theme is Safe Care for Every Newborn and Every Child, with the slogan ‘Patient safety from the start!’ recognising the vulnerability of this age group to risks and harm caused by unsafe care.

The WHO calls for urgent action to eliminate avoidable harm in paediatric care, drive meaningful improvements and reaffirm every child’s right to safe care. It seeks progress across several key areas: safe childbirth and post-natal care, medication safety, diagnostic safety, immunisation safety, infection prevention and early recognition of clinical deterioration. 

The objectives for this year’s campaign are:

• Raise global awareness of safety risks in paediatric care in all healthcare settings, emphasising the specific needs of children, families and caregivers.
• Mobilise governments, healthcare organisations, professional bodies and civil society to implement sustainable strategies for safer care for children, as part of broader patient safety and quality initiatives.
• Empower parents, caregivers and children in patient safety by promoting education, awareness and active participation in care.
• Advocate for strengthening research on patient safety in paediatric care.

More information can be found on the WHO website (please scan QR code to access).

The WHO’s Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030 recognised child safety across multiple strategic objectives, including designing safe clinical processes, strengthening workforce competencies, engaging patients and families and establishing learning systems to prevent harm. The plan also called for patient safety education, including a dedicated curriculum for older school children to equip them with essential knowledge on safety principles and self-advocacy in health care.

WPSD 2025 at RCSEd

The PSG of the College has drawn together a comprehensive, multi-layered campaign to highlight WPSD and champion the theme of Safe Care for Every Newborn and Every Child. Many different resources have been developed, including a wide range of blogs, talking-head sound bites, educational vignettes, recorded talks, an interview with tertiary paediatric surgery centre leaders and a webinar on Designing for Newborn and Child Safety, which will go out on 17 September.

These will be released on social media over the seven days of the College’s WPSD campaign, starting on 15 September. They will be available on the College’s website following the campaign.

RCSEd’s commitment to patient safety

Upholding patient safety and ensuring the highest possible standards of patient care have been at the heart of the College’s activity since it was founded more than 500 years ago. The PSG supports and coordinates all of the College’s patient safety initiatives. We have a multidisciplinary membership drawn from all the faculties of the College and including representation from both the wider surgical team and patients themselves.

Over the years, the College has worked hard to develop numerous resources to help improve patient safety. These have taken many forms and include the ones shown below:

Training courses: These include the highly successful NOTSS programme, PiNTS and DeNTS courses, which aim to educate the whole perioperative team in the non-technical skills that underpin safe operative surgery and dentistry. In addition, the innovative ICoNS workshop was developed with patients to provide training in sharing the complex decisions involved in informed consent.

The Team Based Quality Reviews for Surgical Practice (TBQR)workshop seeks to embed evidence-based structure into significant event review processes through the provision of training, educational resources, tools and frameworks underpinned by human factors.

The Making Sense of Mistakes workshop considers the impact of mistakes on all those involved, looking at how best to support and prepare each other and how we might respond appropriately to patients and their families in the aftermath.

The Addressing Conflict in Surgical Teams workshop explores the causes and effects of conflict within the surgical workplace and discusses different strategies to address this, including how to have difficult conversations, the art of negotiation and how to approach challenging situations.

Web-based resources: These include the Surgical Ward Round Toolkit, which aims to reduce errors and improve the safety on surgical ward rounds.

Patient safety webinars: This very popular 10-part series featured contributions from renowned world experts in the patient safety arena, drawn from a wide range of disciplines.

Let’s Talk Surgery Patient Safety podcast series: These experts have also contributed to the College’s podcast series, which offers more in-depth personal discussion on key patient safety topics.

Surgeons’ News articles: The PSG has published a large number of articles in Surgeons’ News, covering a broad range of patient safety topics.

RCSEd Annual Quality Improvement and Audit Symposium: This popular event provides an opportunity for surgical and dental trainees to present and receive feedback on their audit and quality improvement projects.

MSc in Patient Safety and Clinical Human Factors: We have worked with the University of Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Surgery Online Programme to develop a three-year, part-time MSc in Patient Safety and Clinical Human Factors.

The MacLeod McLaren Medal in Patient Safety: This prestigious medal, established this year, celebrates the efforts of multidisciplinary teams who focus on improving patient safety in either clinical settings or through research.

National campaigns: A cornerstone of RCSEd’s efforts in embedding a safer culture is the #LetsRemoveit campaign. This was launched in 2017 to address bullying and undermining in the surgical workforce, and was extended in 2024 to focus on stamping out sexual misconduct in surgery. 

The online hub offers an extensive suite of tools for the whole perioperative team, including posters designed for display in theatre, wards and teaching areas, as well as prepared presentations to stimulate conversation on poor behaviour.

National guidelines: The College has also developed several national guidelines to influence healthcare policy and improve the working environment. Topics include improving the working environment for safe surgical care, improving safety out of hours and raising concerns, whistleblowing and speaking up.

Staff resilience and wellbeing: We also recognise that staff resilience and wellbeing are major factors in helping to ensure safe patient care. Improving surgical team wellbeing and mental health has been a major focus for the College over the past few years. The College Trainees’ Committee has taken the lead in this and has run very successful ‘wellbeing weeks’ over the past four years

Patient and carer support: The PSG has worked hard in recent years to develop high-quality, innovative and accessible resources to support surgical and dental patients and their carers. It is hoped that these resources will help patients to better navigate surgical care and empower them to be advocates for their own health.

Scan the QR code or visit the College’s website and social media channels for more information on all these patient safety resources.