International Patient Safety Day
15 September 2017. The focus of this year's International Patient Safety Day, to be held on 17th September 2017, is: "If silence is dangerous – communication in the healthcare system". This International Patient Safety Day was declared by the German Coalition for Patient Safety and its international partner organisations. Federal Minister of Health Hermann Gröhe is patron of the German Coalition for Patient Safety.
As a means of improving the physician-patient dialogue, the Federal Ministry of Health funded the drawing up of a model syllabus for "Communication in Medicine", within the framework of the National Cancer Plan. The syllabus teaches students, throughout their entire medical studies, the skills necessary to share their knowledge of diagnosis and treatment comprehensibly, to be responsive to the questions posed by patients and relatives, and to provide patients with the requisite support throughout their course of treatment. A corresponding model syllabus is currently being created for nursing care.
Furthermore, the Independent Patient Counselling Services for Germany were expanded and strengthened by increasing the annual available funding from 5.2 to 9 million euros. The Independent Patient Counselling Services offer free counselling in health matters, as well as in the legal aspects of health matters. As a result, patients now have well-informed persons they can contact, even outside the framework of their medical treatment.
Thanks to the Hospital Structures Act, in future, patients will be better able to acquaint themselves with the quality of the services offered by a specific hospital. In the future, too, the quality reports published by the hospitals will contain a section providing patients with comprehensible information, particularly on patient safety, the observance of hygienic standards and the staffing of specialised departments. Plainly speaking, this means that patients will be better able to compare the quality of different hospitals.
Moreover, the Federal Ministry of Health commissioned the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care to devise a concept for a National Health Portal by 2018. The purpose of the portal would be to collect trustworthy, scientifically proven and independent health-related information in one place.
Given that the topic of patient safety is also of international significance, and that patients all over the world need to be sure that they will receive good and safe care, the Federal Minister of Health, Hermann Gröhe, together with his British colleague in office, Jeremy Hunt, took the opportunity at the Global Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety, held in Bonn in March 2017, to successfully advocate in favour of adding 17th September to the list of international United Nations (UN) and World Health Organisation (WHO) action days.