The World Health Organization (WHO) launched its “Solutions for Safety” program yesterday to help reduce the toll of health care-related harm affecting millions of patients worldwide.

“Recognizing that health care errors affect one in every 10 patients around the world, the WHO’s World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Collaborating Centre have packaged nine effective solutions to reduce such errors,” said WHO Director-General Dr Margaret Chan. “Implementing these solutions is a way to improve patient safety.”

The WHO would like its Member States to re-design patient care processes and make them safer in the following areas:

1. Look-alike, sound-alike medication names;
2. Patient identification;
3. Communication during patient hand-overs;
4. Performance of correct procedure at correct body site;
5. Control of concentrated electrolyte solutions;
6. Assuring medication accuracy at transitions in care;
7. Avoiding catheter and tubing misconnections;
8. Single use of injection devices; and
9. Improved hand hygiene to prevent health care-associated infection.

The organization has provided information materials on each of these areas and sees them as an inaugural set to get the effort off the ground. A separate pilot will study and measure the impact, implementation and long-term results of the Patient Safety program.

The WHO clearly recognizes the challenges this initiative poses given the complexity of health care and lack of international standardization. So it set some practical expectations.

“The Solutions from this initiative will not address the broad underlying causes of patient safety problems (e.g. inadequate resources), but rather will be directed at the specific level where good process design can prevent (potential) human errors from actually reaching the patient. “

While I think the official estimates of medical errors worldwide are grossly underestimated, this program hits all the right tones as it seeks to build an international consensus on how to move forward.