PATIENT SAFETY
CONFERENCE 2025

Innovation is often presented as a driver of safer care and more resilient health systems. But in today’s rapidly changing healthcare landscape, the reality is more complex. Breakthrough technologies may hold great potential, but their impact on patient safety and workforce resilience depends on whether they can be developed and implemented in ways that reflect real-world constraints, such as health workforce shortages and growing demands of care.

This session moves beyond wishful thinking to explore what it takes for innovation to become a meaningful driver of safety. Achieving this requires us to understand the constraints that the different stakeholders of patient safety have to adapt to. For those who carry responsibility of care, it demands recognition of the structural barriers they face in practice, including efficiency pressures and fatigue, all of which limit their capacity to uptake and effectively implement innovation. Patient organisations, for their part, play a crucial role in shaping and evaluating innovation, but they increasingly struggle to secure sustainable, independent funding, which limits their ability to remain fully engaged and credible voices in safety and policy debates. Meanwhile, industry actors are under pressure to align with value-based care models, demonstrating real-world outcomes and system-wide benefits. In this context, stronger collaboration and better alignment between stakeholders, from those who design technologies to those who deliver care and those who represent patients, seems the only way towards delivering safer care and better outcomes.

Key Questions:

• What does it take for innovation to become a meaningful driver of patient safety in real-world healthcare settings?
• How can healthcare professionals be supported to adopt innovation safely amid workforce shortages and operational stress?
• How can patient organisations remain independent and actively involved in shaping innovation, despite declining financial support?
• Under which conditions can cardiovascular health become a model for collaborative, patient-centred innovation?

As care increasingly shifts from hospitals to homes, patient safety is exposed to new and largely unregulated risks. Informal caregivers – often family members – now carry out medical tasks without clinical training or institutional support. While digital technologies (e.g. wearables, telemonitoring) promise improved coordination, they are no substitute for robust safety strategies and training at the interface of professional and informal care.

This session highlights how ageing populations and systemic healthcare strains contribute to this transition, and it reframes home-based care as a shared safety challenge. The workshop will explore real-world safety risks, emotional consequences for caregivers (such as the double victim phenomenon), and how to build effective training and support structures across all stakeholders – including healthcare institutions, policymakers, and patient organisations.

Objectives:

• Understand the patient safety implications of informal care in home settings.
• Identify underrecognized risks such as medication errors, improper mobility support, and communication breakdowns.
• Explore emotional burden and second victim phenomena in caregiving contexts.
• Share models of training and systemic support, including the BetterCare COST Action network.

Key questions:

• What are the primary patient safety risks in home care and informal caregiving?
• How can institutions support caregivers to prevent avoidable harm and emotional fallout?
• What training is needed – for caregivers and professionals alike – to ensure safer transitions and continuity of care?
• How can digital innovation complement, but not replace, relational and institutional safeguards?

Moderators:

Many hospitals struggle to integrate patient safety at the same level as financial stability, workforce retention, cybersecurity, and sustainability. Can AI help shift patient safety from methodologies that are mainly reactive to proactive, system-level strategies? Can a learning healthcare system, powered by data, make safety a strategic asset?
This session explores how leadership can combine safety goals with broader organisational priorities.

Key Questions:

• What prevents patient safety from becoming a system-wide strategic goal?
• Can AI and data systems help anticipate and prevent safety incidents?
• How do safety goals intersect with financial and organisational pressures?

Nurses are essential to patient safety, through their presence at the bedside, their early detection of complications, and their coordination of care. Yet their role is rapidly evolving as new technologies, care models, and safety demands reshape healthcare systems. This session will examine how infection prevention, illustrates both the leadership nurses already provide and the systemic barriers they face. It will also reflect on what’s needed: better training, improved recognition and collaboration, access to data, and a stronger voice in system-level safety decisions.

Key Questions:

• How is the role of nurses in patient safety evolving, and what’s driving this change?
• Why does infection prevention make visible the challenges and potential of nursing leadership?
• What barriers limit nurses from leading effectively in infection prevention? (e.g. training, recognition, data systems)
• What concrete steps can institutions and policymakers and industry take to support nursing leadership in this area?

Moderator:

Speakers:

In healthcare systems under pressure facing digital transformation, staff shortages, and rising patient expectations, the human relationship between patients and professionals remains central to care. This session will explore why it matters to reaffirm the centrality of empathy, listening, and shared decision-making in clinical practice.

By bringing the human dimension to the forefront, these efforts do more than offer emotional comfort; they help improve patient outcomes, reduce misunderstandings, fight disinformation, support adherence to treatment, and ultimately rebuild trust between patients, professionals, and the healthcare system.

Key Questions:

• What does it mean to truly put the human at the centre of care today?
• How do real-world projects succeed in translating this principle into practice?
• What are the effects of strengthening humanity in care for patients, professionals, and the safety of care?
• How can organisations support and scale such efforts, especially in a digitalising environment?

Speakers:

Additional speakers will be confirmed soon

At the occasion of the 2025 edition of the Patient Safety Conference we are organising the second edition of the Butterfly Impact Award: Small actions, Big Changes in Patient Safety, aimed at recognising outstanding contributions to patient safety. Read more

During this session three finalists will present their projects and the audience will decide about the ranking of the finalists through the interactive voting at the end of the session.

Moderator:

Digital health, AI, and electronic health records offer both risks and opportunities. While data security and interoperability are essential, there’s growing potential for using data to anticipate risks, tailor care, and inform system-wide learning. However, concerns about privacy and data ownership remain crucial.

Key Questions:

• What safeguards are needed for secure, ethical use of patient data?
• How can patient data be used to improve safety and personalise care?
• Who owns patient data, and how should access and control be managed?

Simulation offers healthcare professionals a unique, protected space to develop and improve both technical and non-technical skills, without putting patients at risk. This session will present the latest and foreseable developments in high-quality simulation and explore why simulation is a natural ally for advancing patient safety across diverse healthcare environments.

Building on the insights from a dedicated workshop held the day before, the session invites the audience to engage interactively: What potential do they see for simulation to improve patient safety? What barriers to expect when promoting it in their environments? And what strategies or resources would help integrate simulation more effectively?

Key Questions:

• What is the current and foreseable potential of simulation to improve patient safety?
• What barriers to expect when trying to promote the use of simulation in their working environment or networks?
• What strategies, resources, or partnerships could help overcome these barriers and foster the integration of simulation into everyday patient safety efforts?

This lecture will present findings from recent OECD research on the economics of diagnostic safety and explore how diagnostic errors impact health outcomes and system costs, and why investing in safer diagnostic practices is both a clinical and economic imperative. The session will highlight key data, policy insights, and practical implications for health systems aiming to improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency.

This lecture will present how the national version of the European collaborative Fighting Fatigue Together campaign has been brought to life, adapted to the local context. It will offer a real-time case study on how to build a multi-stakeholder initiative from the ground up: engaging partners, shaping messages, and linking healthcare workforce well-being to broader patient safety concerns. The session aims to inspire similar efforts across Europe by showing what it takes to move from idea to action at national level.

This lecture will present the SAFEST project, a Horizon Europe-funded initiative focused on enhancing patient safety in perioperative care. The session will introduce the project’s key objectives and activities aimed at improving surgical outcomes through better training, teamwork, and system-level learning. Attendees will gain insights into how SAFEST supports safer perioperative practices across Europe by promoting innovation, collaboration, and evidence-based improvements.