Patient Safety is core component of care delivery processes. It ensures reduction in medical errors that are among the top causes of death where majority of the errors are preventable. Statistics have shown that failures in basic day-to-day processes like patient identification, appropriate medication management, handover of care between healthcare practitioners etc. are major contributors to medical error.CORE SAFETY STANDARDS

Patient Safety is core component of care delivery processes. It ensures reduction in medical errors that are among the top causes of death where majority of the errors are preventable. Statistics have shown that failures in basic day-to-day processes like patient identification, appropriate medication management, handover of care between healthcare practitioners etc. are major contributors to medical error.

Medical Teaching Institutions (MTIs) are leading care providers in public sector, and the MTI Act necessitates delivery of safe quality care. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Policy Board of Medical Teaching Institutions highly values patient safety and quality of healthcare delivery in the MTIs. It recognizes the importance of structures regulating delivery of care to its community.

For this purpose, the Policy Board is notifying the Accreditation Framework for Core Safety Standards for Medical Teaching Institutions. This framework provides an expectation of minimum performance level by the governance, leadership, staff and students in all MTIs. The expectations are documented in this framework in the form of standards and measurable elements.

This framework has the following sections:

1. Standards: This section describes the minimum performance level expected from the MTI. For each standard, measurable elements are identified – specifying the evaluation mechanism for each standard.
2. Accreditation Methodology: This section describes how the standards are evaluated in an MTI.
3. Scoring: This section describes how standards are scored during the accreditation process.
4. Baseline Evaluation: This section identifies how an MTI can perform baseline evaluation for identifying its standing against the standards.
5. Training and Orientation: This section identifies the different types of trainings that each level of governance and leadership must have gone through to understand the requirements of the standards and their effective implementation
6. Planning for Compliance: This section identifies how planning process can be performed for ensuring that gaps identified during baseline evaluation are addressed.