The Ministry of Health and Welfare marked every third week of October as the Patient Safety Week, as a way of helping people better understand and place more importance on patient safety. This year’s Patient Safety Week ran from October 11th to October 17th. A total of 483 medical institutions nationwide participated in this campaign to jointly promote the importance of patient safety among the public. 

In order to enhance the quality of medical services nationwide and establish a patient safety culture, the Ministry of Health and Welfare continuously assists medical institutions in implementing the annual goals of enhancing medical quality and patient safety tasks, operating the Taiwan Patient Safety Reporting System, strengthening the regulations related to the hospital accreditation standards, responding to the international patient safety operations, conducting surveys on medical awareness and behavior among the public, and so on. The expectations are to offer Taiwanese people a professional and safe environment for medical care as well as to protect their rights in relation to medical care. 

The Ministry of Health and Welfare announces the annual goals regarding medical quality and patient safety tasks on a regular basis, and sets task goals suitable to each hospital and clinic according to their characteristics. For the coming year (2016), the Ministry of Health and Welfare will aim to increase communication efficiency among health care providers, implement patient safety incident management and improve surgical safety, while taking the initiative to provide implementation strategies and methods as a reference and guideline for medical institutions. 

The concept of the Patient Safety Week focuses on the active participation of the public in patient safety tasks, and regards patients and their family members as part of a medical team. The Ministry of Health and Welfare encourages patients and their family members to proactively and actively participate in health care operations, fully understand the conditions of the patients and cooperate closely with medical personnel. 

Moreover, the Ministry of Health and Welfare designed and established the Taiwan Patient Safety Reporting System in 2004 to prevent the recurrence of adverse events in different medical institutions. The system runs on the basis of five major principles: anonymity, voluntariness, exemption from liability, confidentiality and joint learning, in order to help medical care providers continuously learn from mistakes, improve the ability to detect errors in advance and construct a platform for resource sharing, thereby enhancing the safety mechanism. 

In regard to the hospital accreditation system of Taiwan, the issue of patient safety has been included in the new hospital accreditation standards since 2005 to place importance on patients’ rights, and to stress the importance of patient safety. Hospitals are urged to comply with additional accreditation criteria, such as respecting the doctor-patient relationship, ensuring patient care communication, and creating a system and medical environment for patient safety, so as to carry out patient safety operations. To reinforce patient safety and enhance medical quality in Taiwan, the Ministry of Health and Welfare introduced patient safety-related techniques, solutions and competitions from all over the world. Examples included improving the distinctiveness of drug labels, marking the surgical site, preparing a variety of promotional materials concerning patient safety, using surgical safety checklists to avoid medical errors and conducting patient safety culture surveys. It is observed from the recent surveys on medical awareness and behavior among the Taiwanese people that the people proactively verified their basic information (from 73% to 94.2%), cooperated with medical personnel during surgical site marking (from 80.1% to 94.2%) and believe that the medical care process in Taiwan is safe (from 63.1% to 85.6%). These percentages all showed an increasing tendency each year. 

Patient safety has been a public issue in the global health sector, and Taiwan has been proactively taking part in this sector. In the future, the Ministry of Health and Welfare will keep making progress and improve. Please join us to build a safe environment for medical care.