World Patient Safety Day, one of World Health Organization’s (WHO) global public health days and observed annually on 17 September, continues its mission in 2024 to promote global health and safety. Established in 2019, this day serves as a cornerstone for advancing patient safety worldwide.

Grounded in the core principle of medicine, “first, do no harm,” its goals are to raise public awareness, enhance global understanding, and foster solidarity and coordinated action among Member States.

Key strategies to enhance diagnostic safety include:

  • Taking complete patient histories and conducting thorough clinical examinations
  • Improving access to diagnostic tests
  • Developing methods to measure and learn from diagnostic errors
  • Adopting technology-based solutions

Each year, a new theme is chosen to spotlight a critical area in patient safety that requires urgent and focused attention.

This year’s theme, “Improving Diagnosis for Patient Safety,” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!” focuses on the crucial role of accurate and timely diagnosis in safeguarding patient health and enhancing medical outcomes; with diagnostic errors accounting for nearly 16% of preventable harm across health systems.

Diagnosis is key to identifying a patient’s health issues and guiding their care and treatment. Diagnostic errors – such as delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or failures in communicating these findings – pose a significant risk to patient safety. With most adults likely to face at least one diagnostic error in their lifetime, substantial work needs to be done to improve the safety of diagnostic processes.

Improving diagnostic safety involves tackling both systemic and cognitive factors that contribute to errors. Systemic factors include organisational challenges like communication breakdowns, heavy workloads, and inadequate teamwork. Cognitive factors involve clinician training, experience, and managing biases, fatigue, and stress.

World Patient Safety Day 2024 featured a variety of activities, including national campaigns, social media initiatives, advocacy efforts, and technical events, held on and around 17 September. The campaign’s signature tradition of lighting up iconic monuments, landmarks, and public spaces in orange continued this year. WHO encouraged all stakeholders to participate in the global campaign by illuminating the world in orange on 17 September and taking tangible actions to promote diagnostic safety.

WHO remains committed to working with all stakeholders to make diagnostic safety a priority. This involves developing stronger systems, designing safer diagnostic pathways, supporting health workers in making accurate decisions, and engaging patients throughout the diagnostic process.

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