This week at the 40th anniversary of the Declaration of Alma-Ata, the world will assemble at the Global Conference on Primary Health Care, Astana, to recommit to strengthening primary health care for achieving universal health coverage.
Safe primary care is key to the attainment of Health for All, with safety being essential to make universal health coverage effective; because even when care is available, quality problems are widespread and take various forms.
In 2016, WHO published the Technical Series on Safer Primary Care, which consists of nine monographs. Each monograph explores the magnitude and nature of harm in the primary care setting from a different angle, describing the scope, approach, potential solutions, practical next steps and concluding remarks.
Additionally, the series provides links to online toolkits and manuals with practical suggestions for countries and organizations that have committed to moving forward this agenda. The topics are patient engagement, education and training, human factors, administrative errors, diagnostic errors, medication errors, multimorbidity, transitions of care and electronic tools.
The series can be downloaded from http://www.who.int/patientsafety/topics/primary-care/technical_series/en/
The link also leads to a recorded webinar (90 mins), which was held on 16 December 2016 as part of the launch of the series. The webinar was chaired by Sir Liam Donaldson, WHO Envoy for Patient Safety.