Jean White, Chief Nursing Officer for Wales

It gives me great pleasure to add my support to World Patient Safety Day 2020.

All Health systems are rightly focussing on the quality and safety of care they deliver and the NHS in Wales is no different. We want to build on all the progress we have made in recent years and ensure our services providing the highest possible quality and excellent patient experience, improve the health outcomes and helping reduce inequalities whilst getting high value from all our services.

Whilst complex and multi-faceted, our system will have one defining characteristic. The Welsh NHS will always put the patient, the family, the citizen, the community at the centre of all our work.

We will listen to those who use our services, we will engage with them as we plan improvements, we will address their concerns and we will respond to their personal as well as clinical needs. Our vision is one of a Welsh NHS which is safe and compassionate.

These are challenging times however, and the Covid-19 pandemic has placed our health, social care settings under enormous pressure. We also know that every year, some users of our services continue to suffer avoidable harm, and the pandemic, as well as creating new challenges, has also brought into focus many existing challenges.

So it is important now more than ever that we maintain our focus on ensuring our patients and services users are kept safe, learn from when things go wrong and ensure we don’t deviate from our aim and responsibility to make the NHS in Wales a world class provider of health care.