EUROPEAN
PATIENT SAFETY
CONFERENCE 2026

The EUPSF representatives open the conference, welcoming participants from across Europe. With opening speeches from high-level representatives, they set the scene for a day dedicated to safer, more resilient healthcare across Europe.

The lecture will set out why the EUPSF developed its European Strategy for Safe and Resilient Healthcare Systems, and how the conference is built on it. Each of the Strategy’s five priorities anchors a panel session that unpacks its key messages, debates the EUPSF calls for action, and showcases inspiring initiatives already at work across the European patient safety community. It will invite all stakeholders to take the Strategy into their own spheres of influence and turn it into a programme of work shared across Europe.

The decisions that most shape patient safety — care pathways, staffing models, technology procurement, investment — are still rarely taken in the rooms where patient safety has a seat. In December 2024, WHO/Europe reported that only one Member State in three across the WHO European Region has a national action plan on patient safety; the 2009 EU Council Recommendation that frames the European response, meanwhile, is increasingly seen as due for an update.

The EUPSF Strategy 2026–2030 calls for patient safety to become a standing strategic concern at every decision-making level, supported by the European, national and institutional plans and structures that turn that intention into reality.

The session will explore four complementary mechanisms for moving patient safety from operational concern to strategic priority — at international, national and institutional levels — and the possible tensions between them, on a panel-discussion mode.

The interests of patients and healthcare professionals are intrinsically linked: a fatigued, demoralised or unsupported professional is a less safe one, and a professional who cannot speak up cannot contribute to safer care. After two and a half decades of asking individuals to be more vigilant in conditions of chronic understaffing, fatigue, aggression and second-victim trauma, the limits of that approach are now visible across European healthcare.

The EUPSF Strategy 2026–2030 calls for the wellbeing of healthcare professionals to be treated as a core determinant of patient safety in every hospital strategy, supported by the European, institutional and professional policies, frameworks and structures that turn protection into practice.

The session will explore four levers for protecting HCP wellbeing in practice — political, occupational, institutional and professional — and asks how these levers, today often operating in parallel, could be made to work together, on a panel-discussion mode.

For the 2026 edition of the European Patient Safety Conference organised by EUPSF, we are proud to introduce the third edition of the Butterfly Impact Award: Small actions, Big Changes in Patient Safety, aimed at recognising outstanding contributions to patient safety.

Award objectives

• To recognise the benefits of implemented innovative practices with evidence-based impact on patient safety
• To demontrate that technology is not always needed and that patient safety can also be impacted by no-tech or low-tech approaches
• To promote exchange and mutual learning around those initiatives/projects

Three finalists will be invited to present their projects (5-7 min max). The audience will decide about the ranking through the interactive voting at the end of the session.

Application deadline: 15 September 2026 23:59 CET

The patient is the only person continuously present across their entire care pathway, and their information, attention and voice are among the most under-used resources in patient safety. The European Patients’ Forum Barometer on the involvement of patient organisations in health policy reveals fewer than half of European countries with a formal framework for patient involvement, and what does exist is too often consultation rather than partnership.

The EUPSF Strategy 2026–2030 calls for patient and family involvement to be recognised as a fundamental component of safe practice, supported by the tools, governance arrangements and post-harm support structures that move patients from being consulted to being full partners in safer care.

The session will explore four complementary perspectives on what it actually takes to move patient involvement from consultation to full partnership in European healthcare — from governance to the bedside to the moment after harm — on a panel-discussion mode.

Over the course of the day, the five priorities of the EUPSF Strategy 2026–2030 have been unpacked through the experience of those who carry them in the field. Their messages converge on a single conviction: that demonstrated change in one care setting, one team, one organisation, one country is what creates the conditions for change everywhere else — through emulation among peers, and through the political weight it gives policy-makers to act. The closing panel brings EUPSF Board members together to set out their own perspectives on what it will take to turn the Strategy from a document into a programme of work shared across Europe over 2026–2030, and on the role EUPSF can play to support the patient safety community in carrying it forward.