Finnish patient safety/guidelines and patient safety in World Health Organization : Learning material

Abstract

Patient safety is the fundamental principle in health care and social services. Despite this, adverse patient safety events are common and their burden on the economy is huge. Different stakeholders, within health care and social services, have their own definitions for patient safety and implement different actions for continuously safer health care. Patient safety is the largest component of quality health care and it consists of care/treatment safety, medicine/medication safety and equipment safety. World Health Organization (WHO) is internationally working towards safer health care and is providing knowledge, networks and guidelines on the subject. In Finland health care and social services are regulated by acts, and different authorities are responsible for the guidance and monitoring of patient safety.

The aim of this project was to find out the official, legislation based, Finnish patient safety guidelines on national level, and then to classify them, in order to develop a learning material. The learning material was developed for Metropolia University of Applied Sciences. The purpose of this project was to understand how patient safety issues are organized in Finland and also familiarize how patient safety is organized within World Health Organization. This project is done according to the research based developing method and the developmental findings are gathered together into the learning material booklet.

Learning material booklet contains the definitions of patient safety and guideline definition, development and usage. After overall patient safety introduction, it is represented the patient safety in World Health Organization (WHO) and in Finland. WHO's work towards safer health care are explained and Finnish patient safety actors and national patient safety guidelines are represented.

Patient safety is very important, but sometimes a forgotten component of health care in general. Overall it would benefit from an increase in co-operation between its stakeholders, organizations and governments. This project revealed only slightly, the current patient safety status in Finland.