Patient Safety, a key component of quality of care, has gained great relevance in recent years both for patients and their families, who want to feel safe and confident in the health care received, and for managers and professionals who want to offer safe, effective and efficient health care.

Undesired side effects in health care represent a cause of high morbidity and mortality in all developed health systems. The fundamental reason is the increasing complexity of patient management, in which organisational factors, personal factors of professionals and disease-related factors interact. The damage that can be caused to patients in the health care sector and the cost it poses to health systems is of such relevance that the main international health organisations and agencies have developed strategies in recent years to propose plans, actions and legislative measures to control avoidable adverse events in clinical practice. In this context, it is worth highlighting the WHO Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021-2030 , at the 74th World Health Assembly. This has the aim of enhancing patient safety as an essential component in the design, procedures and performance of systems around the world.

At a national level, the Ministry of Health, in its responsibility to improve the quality of the health system as a whole, as established by Law 16/2003, on Cohesion and Quality of the National Health System , has placed patient safety at the centre of health policies as one of the key elements of quality improvement.

It has driven and promoted the Patient Safety Strategy of the National Health System (SNS) since its first version developed in 2005 in collaboration with the Autonomous Communities and various professionals through its organisations.

After 10 years of its development, an update was produced for the period 2015-2020 and, after its evaluation conducted in 2021, work began on the new edition with a broader time horizon 2025-2035. This allows deploying and developing all the objectives set, highlighting: reducing to the maximum the possible damages associated with health care; prioritising patient safety in all health plans as a cross-cutting dimension of care quality and promoting patient safety at all levels and areas of care of the National Health System.

Objectives

The objectives of the Patient Safety Strategy 2025-2035 are:

• Achieve the maximum possible reduction of avoidable damages due to unsafe health care in the National Health System.
• Prioritise patient safety in all health plans as a nuclear and cross-cutting dimension of quality of care.

Improve, promote and index patient safety at all levels and in all areas of the National Health System.

You can consult the Patient Safety Strategy 2025-2035 here .