The World Health Organization estimates that around 1 in every 10 patients is harmed while receiving health care, and more than 3 million deaths occur annually due to unsafe care. In response, the WHO has built a comprehensive global framework to reduce preventable harm, including action plans, safety tools, training programs, and annual campaigns. Here’s what that framework looks like and why it matters.
The Scale of Patient Harm Worldwide
Patient safety refers to preventing errors and adverse events during health care delivery. The numbers are stark: roughly 10% of patients experience some form of harm during treatment. In low- and middle-income countries, the problem is even more severe, with as many as 4 in every 100 people dying from unsafe care.
More than half of all patient harm is preventable. That means 1 in every 20 patients suffers harm that didn’t need to happen. Medications account for about half of that preventable harm, making drug errors the single largest category. The most common sources of harm across health care settings include medication errors, diagnostic mistakes, infections acquired during care, problems with medical devices, and missed warning signs when a patient’s condition deteriorates.
The financial toll is enormous. In England alone, adverse events in the National Health Service cost approximately £1 billion annually in direct health care costs, while lost productivity from patient harm has been estimated at over £13 billion per year for the broader UK economy. Clinical negligence payments in England reached nearly £2.7 billion in 2022-2023. These figures illustrate a pattern that repeats across every health system: unsafe care drains resources that could be spent on better treatment.
The Global Patient Safety Action Plan (2021-2030)
In 2021, the WHO launched its Global Patient Safety Action Plan, a decade-long roadmap with a clear goal: achieve the maximum possible reduction in avoidable harm due to unsafe health care globally. The plan is built around seven strategic objectives, each supported by specific strategies that governments, hospitals, and health workers can implement.
- Policies to eliminate avoidable harm. Making zero avoidable harm a guiding principle in how care is planned and delivered everywhere.
- High-reliability health systems. Building organizations that protect patients from harm as a daily operating standard, not an afterthought.
- Safety of clinical processes. Ensuring that every clinical procedure, from surgery to prescribing, has built-in safeguards.
- Patient and family engagement. Empowering patients and their families to participate actively in making their own care safer.
- Health worker education, skills, and safety. Training and protecting the workforce so they can design and deliver safe care systems.
- Information and risk management. Creating a constant flow of data to identify risks, reduce harm, and drive improvement.
- Partnerships and solidarity. Building cross-sector and international cooperation to raise safety standards globally.
Together, these objectives form a framework of 35 specific strategies that countries can adapt to their own health systems. The plan recognizes that patient safety isn’t just a clinical issue. It requires policy changes, workforce investment, better technology, and active participation from patients themselves.
Medication Without Harm
Because medication errors cause so much preventable harm, the WHO created a dedicated initiative called Medication Without Harm. Its target is ambitious: reduce severe avoidable medication-related harm by 50% globally within five years.
The initiative focuses on three high-risk areas. The first is polypharmacy, where patients take multiple medications simultaneously, increasing the chance of dangerous drug interactions. The second is high-risk situations, such as care involving look-alike or sound-alike drugs, or medications with narrow safety margins. The third is transitions of care, the handoff points where patients move between providers, departments, or from hospital to home. These transitions are when medication lists get lost, doses get changed without clear communication, and errors multiply.
The Surgical Safety Checklist
One of the WHO’s most tangible contributions to patient safety is the Surgical Safety Checklist, a simple protocol used before, during, and after surgery. It covers basics that sound obvious but were historically inconsistent: confirming the patient’s identity, marking the correct surgical site, verifying allergies, and counting instruments before closing.
The results have been dramatic. A systematic review of studies on the checklist found it was associated with a 36.6% reduction in surgical mortality in one large Scottish study. In another study, the rate of any complication dropped from 22.9% to 10% after implementation. A US study found death rates fell from 1.5% to 0.8%. Overall adverse event rates dropped from 23.6% to 8.2% in one analysis. These are significant improvements from what is essentially a one-page document, and they demonstrate how standardizing simple steps can save lives.
Reducing Diagnostic Errors
Diagnostic errors, including delayed, missed, or wrong diagnoses, are among the most harmful and least studied types of patient safety failures. Research identifies two broad categories of root causes. The first is cognitive: clinicians rely on mental shortcuts that sometimes lead them astray, anchoring on an initial impression or overlooking less common conditions. The second is systemic: poor communication between providers, fragmented test results, and lack of follow-up protocols.
Several practical interventions target these problems. Clinical decision support tools integrated into electronic health records can flag potential diagnoses that a provider might not have considered, presenting relevant information at the point of care. Result notification systems ensure that abnormal lab or imaging findings don’t fall through the cracks, a surprisingly common problem in busy practices. Training programs focused on clinical reasoning help providers recognize and counteract their own cognitive biases. And structured peer review allows colleagues to catch potential diagnostic errors before they affect the patient.
Safer Primary Care
Most patient safety research has historically focused on hospitals, but the WHO’s technical series on safer primary care highlights that outpatient settings carry their own risks. The most common error categories in primary care are medication errors (wrong drug, wrong dose, harmful interactions), diagnostic errors (conditions missed or identified too late), administrative errors (misfiled records, scheduling failures, miscommunication between offices), and breakdowns in care processes (poor follow-up on referrals or test results).
These errors tend to be less dramatic than surgical complications but far more common, simply because primary care handles the vast majority of health care encounters worldwide. A prescribing error in a clinic may not make headlines, but multiplied across millions of visits, it adds up to enormous preventable harm.
Patient and Family Involvement
The WHO’s framework positions patients and families not as passive recipients of care but as active safety partners. The organization’s Patients for Patient Safety initiative brings together people who have experienced harm to advocate for systemic change. The underlying principle is straightforward: patients notice things that busy clinicians miss, and their perspective is essential to designing safer systems.
Effective involvement requires more than good intentions. It depends on clear organizational policies, leadership that prioritizes safety culture, data systems that track and learn from errors, skilled professionals who welcome patient input, and processes that make it easy for patients to speak up. When these elements come together, patients can help catch errors in real time, contribute to safety reporting, and participate meaningfully in decisions about their own care.
Training the Next Generation
To embed safety thinking early, the WHO published a Multi-professional Patient Safety Curriculum Guide designed for medical, nursing, pharmacy, and other health professions students. The guide includes 11 patient safety topics, each with ready-to-teach materials that universities can adopt as a complete course or integrate topic by topic into existing programs. A companion section for educators covers how to build institutional capacity for patient safety education, from program planning to course design. The goal is to make safety a core professional competency rather than something clinicians learn only after an error occurs.
World Patient Safety Day
Since 2019, the WHO has marked September 17 as World Patient Safety Day, using a different theme each year to spotlight specific risks. The 2025 campaign focuses on safe care for newborns and children up to age nine, with the slogan “Patient safety from the start!” The campaign emphasizes that children are not small adults. They require care tailored to their age, weight, developmental stage, and ability to communicate. Children face the highest risks in intensive care and during complex treatments, where medication dosing errors and infections acquired during care are particularly dangerous.
The annual observance serves as both a public awareness campaign and a call to action for health systems. It brings global attention to a dimension of quality that, despite its enormous human and economic cost, often receives less funding and policy focus than disease-specific programs.