Celebrating WHO World Patient Safety Day 2025
Safe Care for Every Newborn and Every Child - Designing for Child Safety
17th September 2025, 19:00 to 20:00 BST
Overview
World Patient Safety Day (WPSD), which takes place annually on 17 September, was launched by the WHO in 2018 to raise public awareness, foster collaboration between stakeholders and mobilise global action to improve patient safety.
This year's theme is Safe Care for Every Newborn and Every Child, with the slogan “Patient safety from the start!”, recognising the vulnerability of this age group to risks and harm caused by unsafe care. The WHO calls for urgent action to eliminate avoidable harm in paediatric and newborn care, driving meaningful improvements and reaffirming every child's right to safe and quality care.
To help celebrate this year’s WPSD, the RCSEd are hosting this webinar on the importance of system design in helping to ensure safety for neonates and children. We will hear from a panel of paediatric surgery consultants, innovators and human factors experts on how we can best design systems and built environments to help ensure safety in paediatric surgical care.
The importance of creating a simulated environment to allow people to fail safely and of ensuring appropriate psychological support when they do will be discussed. How to troubleshoot a build as a clinician to identify and ameliorate potential risks will also be covered. We will also learn how we can adopt a multi-factorial system based approach to improving paediatric surgical care.
The principles discussed will be transferable across all surgical specialties.
Aims
The aim of this webinar is to celebrate World Patient Safety Day and to help participants provide safe surgical care for every newborn and every child.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this webinar, participants will:
- Have a better understanding of World Patient Safety Day and the RCSEd’s commitment to patient safety.
- Appreciate the importance of simulation in learning and innovation, together with the value of being able to fail safely.
- Recognise the importance of appropriate support for staff when developing new services.
- Be better able to identify and ameliorate potential patient safety risks in any new infrastructure build.
- Be more confident in adopting a system wide, human factors approach when designing surgical services for neonates and children.
Panellists
Our panellists include:
Chair: Miss Anna Paisley, BMBCh, MA, DM, FRCSEd (Gen Surg), FFSTEd
Consultant General & Upper GI Surgeon, RCSEd Council Member and Chair Patient Safety Group.
Professor Iain Hennessey, MBChB (hons), BSc(hons), MMIS, FRCS(Ed), FRSA
Talk Title: The Importance of Simulation: creating a culture to allow staff to learn from failure
Consultant Paediatric and Neonatal Surgeon Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. Director and Founder, Alder Hey Innovation Hub. Associate Medical Director. Cheshire and Mersey NHS Integrated Care Board – Innovation lead. Honorary Clinical Professor, University of Liverpool.
Mrs Sarah Wood, MBChB, FRCSEd (Paediatric Surgery)
Talk Title: How do Human Factors affect design or redesign of a paediatric environment – how you can understand, influence and mitigate risks
Consultant Paediatric and Neonatal Surgeon, Divisional Governance Lead, Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. Member RCSEd Surgical Specialty Board (SSB) Paediatric Surgery. Paediatric Surgery Training Programme Director.
Dr. Lauren Morgan, C.Erg.HF
Talk Title: What have we got left to learn about safety in paediatric surgery?
Director, Morgan Human Systems Ltd.
CPD
1 Hour
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Recording
A recording of the webinar will be made available on this page in the days following the live broadcast.
