Patient safety
Patient safety must become a system foundation
Patient safety should be at the core of our approach to health and care. The Association of British HealthTech Industries’ Patient Safety Group believes that industry can, and must, play a key role in ensuring this. To support this, the association has partnered with Patient Safety Learning to develop a new white paper tackling the key issues. ABHI’s Jonathan Evans provides an overview.
Despite decades of awareness, patient safety remains one of the most persistent and troubling challenges facing healthcare systems. Patients rightly expect safe, effective and compassionate care, yet avoidable harm continues to occur at scale, often with devastating consequences for individuals, families and healthcare professionals. Globally, patient safety incidents represent one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality, despite a significant proportion being preventable. In England, estimates suggest that around
one in ten patients experiences harm during hospital care, with approximately half of these incidents deemed avoidable. The financial cost is equally stark. In high-income countries, unsafe care accounts for close to 9% of total health expenditure, diverting billions of pounds away from frontline services. However, focusing solely on cost risks missing the wider picture; every incident of avoidable harm represents a failure of the system to protect those it exists to serve. Yet the challenge is not one of ignorance or
indifference. Healthcare has no shortage of patient safety strategies, reporting systems or well-intentioned initiatives. What remains lacking is a consistent, system-wide approach that embeds safety as a core design principle rather than treating it as a reactive function once harm has already occurred. This challenge, and the opportunity to
address it, is the starting point for ABHI Patient Safety System Foundations: A Call for Action, developed by the ABHI Patient Safety Group,
one of ABHI’s member groups, in collaboration with the charity, Patient Safety Learning. ABHI is the membership body for the UK HealthTech industry, representing 400 companies across the sector. The report argues that if avoidable harm is to be meaningfully reduced, patient safety must be hardwired into how healthcare systems are led, regulated, commissioned and delivered, with HealthTech, encompassing medical devices, diagnostics and digital health technologies, positioned as a trusted partner in that transformation.
In England, estimates suggest that around one in ten patients experiences harm during hospital care, with approximately half of these incidents deemed avoidable.
A system under strain and a moment for change The persistence of avoidable harm cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader pressures facing the health system. Workforce shortages, burnout, ageing infrastructure, rising demand and constrained capital investment all increase the risk of harm, while simultaneously reducing the capacity to respond. These pressures have been laid bare in recent assessments of NHS performance, which point to a system operating under sustained strain, with limited headroom for recovery. At the same time, the NHS 10-Year Health Plan sets out a bold and necessary vision for reform, structured around three major shifts: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention. Together, these ambitions represent a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink how care is delivered and
March 2026 I
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