Patient safety – our burden to cherish

Abstract

I’m here today in celebration of our profession and our ability to keep patients safe despite the many risks. I am a keen scholar in the science of patient safety and used to oversee the hospital events management system for Mediclinic Southern Africa. The HEM system is a database where all adverse events and near misses are captured, so that there is a record of them, but more importantly, patient safety incidents are captured, so that we can learn how and why they happened in the first place.