World Patient Safety Day 2025

Happy World Patient Safety Day! World Patient Safety Day reminds us that ensuring safe care is a shared responsibility across the whole healthcare system. It’s a chance to reflect, learn and act on the latest initiatives that help protect patients and strengthen a culture of safety.

A Message from Professor Chris Hopkins, President of the Academy for Healthcare Science on World Patient Safety Day, 2025

On 17th September 2025, the World Health Organisation marks World Patient Safety Day, this year themed “Safe care for every newborn and every child – Patient safety from the start!”.

Within this global context, the role of healthcare scientists is fundamental. As President of the Academy for Healthcare Science, I am proud to affirm the profession’s central contribution to safeguarding patients, particularly newborns and children, through the integration of scientific innovation, professional accountability, and regulatory assurance. Our discipline operates at the critical interface of advanced diagnostics, therapeutic technologies, and system-wide standards, ensuring that safety is not optional but intrinsic.

Regulation and Standards: Foundations of Safe Care

Effective professional regulation provides the foundation for patient safety. It establishes the frameworks that guarantee competence, ethical conduct, and accountability in practice. Through the Academy and wider professional bodies, healthcare scientists are held to the highest standards of education, training, continuing professional development and quality assurance. These mechanisms provide the framework necessary for consistency, accuracy, and reliability in both diagnostics and clinical interventions.

Healthcare Scientists as Guardians of Safety and Innovation

Healthcare scientists are not only practitioners of established science but also drivers of innovation in patient safety. This is evidenced through the development of age-appropriate diagnostic reference ranges, the validation of emerging technologies, and the surveillance of medication and infection risks. By transforming complex data into actionable insights, healthcare scientists support evidence-based practice, strengthen clinical decision-making, and enhance resilience across healthcare systems.

Alignment with WHO Goals for WPSD 2025

The Academy’s commitment is closely aligned with the WHO’s five strategic goals for World Patient Safety Day 2025:

Engaging families in safe care;
Enhancing medication safety;
Improving diagnostics;
Preventing healthcare-associated infections;
Reducing risks for small and sick newborns.

Healthcare scientists operationalise these goals by embedding them into accredited laboratory processes, structured audits, cross-disciplinary governance frameworks, and proactive surveillance systems. In doing so, they provide the assurance that patient safety is systematically integrated into daily practice.

Patient Safety from the Start: A Shared Responsibility

The principle of “Patient safety from the start” reinforces a collective obligation: to design healthcare systems that are safe by design rather than by exception. This requires that, from the moment of birth, every diagnostic test, clinical protocol, and therapeutic intervention is guided by the highest professional standards and sustained by robust regulatory oversight.

On this World Patient Safety Day, the Academy for Healthcare Science reaffirms its commitment to safeguarding newborns and children through scientific excellence, rigorous regulation, and an unwavering dedication to patient safety. In doing so, healthcare scientists continue to embody their role as guardians of trust, safety, and innovation at the heart of healthcare delivery.

A word from Jude Savage, AHCS Deputy Registrar:

Following on from our President’s World Patient Safety Day message, the Regulation Team would like to echo Chris’s thoughts on the benefits of Professional Registration as one of a number of important mechanisms to enhance patient safety.

As we enter WPSD for 2025, we are reminded the concept of patient safety is not a new one. There have been several publications looking at where it began and the development of the concept, to where it is now, existing as a distinct healthcare discipline. A widely accepted key time point was in the late 1990s when the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published the report, “To Err is Human.”

The find out more, explore the following resources, just a sample of the information on the subject;