Patient safety is at the heart of quality healthcare, and in Ireland, the Health Service Executive (HSE) is taking meaningful steps to embed safety, collaboration, and learning into everyday practice.
For 2025, the theme is “Safe Care for Every Newborn and Every Child” with a special focus on those from birth to nine years old. The slogan “Patient safety from the start!” highlights the urgent need to act early and consistently to prevent harm during childhood.
Research shows that in neonatal intensive care, between 0.7 and 2.4 adverse events occur per admission, with up to 97% considered preventable. In paediatric intensive care units, about one in six children experience an Adverse Drug Event, and more than half of these events could have been prevented. These figures highlight the importance of early action and robust patient safety measures to protect the most vulnerable patients
Source: WHO
To mark this important awareness day, we spoke with Dr. Maureen Flynn, Director of Nursing, Quality and Patient Safety Lead at the HSE, to learn more about why this year’s theme matters, the tools available to support staff, and her vision for the future of patient safety in Ireland.
In this blog, you'll discover:
Why World Patient Safety Day 2025 matters
How the HSE Quality and Patient Safety Competency Navigator supports staff
Why shared learning is critical for safer care
The role of EQUIPS in connecting research to practice
Dr. Flynn’s vision for patient safety in Ireland
Why World Patient Safety Day 2025 Matters
Each year, World Patient Safety Day provides an opportunity to raise awareness, foster collaboration, and mobilise global action to improve patient safety.
Children are particularly vulnerable because their bodies and systems are still developing. In Ireland, studies and HSE data indicate that around one in eight hospital admissions involve an adverse event, with a substantial proportion considered preventable.
Source: HSE
On 17 September 2025, HSE marked World Patient Safety Day with its third National Patient and Public Partnership Conference at Croke Park, highlighting co-design with families and communities - a core principle of both the World Health Organisation Global Patient Safety Action Plan (2021–2030)and Ireland’s strategy.
Building Skills with the Quality and Patient Safety Competency Navigator
In Ireland, one of the HSE’s most innovative tools is the Quality and Patient Safety (QPS) Competency Navigator, developed in partnership with University College Dublin, and patient partners.
This interactive resource helps staff, students, and leaders identify their strengths and gaps across six key competency areas:
The Navigator allows users to self-assess, plan professional development, and access curated toolkits and resources. Importantly, it’s free and available to everyone—healthcare professionals, educators, and even patient partners.
“It’s called a competency navigator because it’s not for once off use. It’s to be used across your healthcare journey, whether you’re a student, a staff member, a leader, a policymaker, or a faculty teacher of quality and patient safety.””
This tool aligns with the World Health Organisation’s global push for capacity building and education as outlined in their Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021–2030 towards Zero Patient Harm in Health care. One of the seven strategic objectives in the framework for action is to “Build high-reliability systems and a competent health workforce.” You can view the full action plan here.
Practical Tools for Real Change
Beyond the Navigator, the HSE Quality Improvement Toolkit offers a structured, six-step approach to tackling issues in care delivery—from identifying problems and measuring outcomes to testing and sustaining change.
With 17 practical tools and real-world case studies, it empowers staff to turn feedback, audits, or incident reports into meaningful improvements.
Another example of practical tools is the clinical audit toolkit developed and tested for nurse referral for radiological procedures in collaboration with the HSE National Centre for Clinical Audit
The Importance of Shared Learning
Healthcare is too complex for any one team or hospital to tackle safety challenges in isolation. The HSE’s Patient Safety Together creates a platform for rapid learning across Ireland through:
HSE National Patient Safety Alerts (NPSAs) for issuing priority which requires HSE services and HSE funded agencies to take specific action(s) within an identified timeframe.
Patient Safety Supplements sharing and raising awareness of quality and patient safety information
HSE Patient Safety Digests that collate research and regulatory updates
Quarterly community events for frontline staff to exchange insights
Patient safety stories that highlight real experiences and improvements
By fostering a culture of openness and collaboration, the HSE is building a stronger, safer healthcare system.
“The HSE is the largest employer in Ireland. So you can just think of the volume of care being delivered. We all have our own experiences. We come across incidents, we all learn, but how do we share? So the Patient Safety Together community is a mechanism of doing that sharing nationally”
The scale of the challenge makes such mechanisms vital. In 2024, over 109,300 adverse incidents were reported across the HSE, including 497 classified as “extreme” and 158 as “major” events. While most incidents caused little or no harm, the numbers show just how important it is to learn quickly and share lessons widely. By creating HSE NPSAs, supplements, national digests, quarterly calls informed by research, incident data and trends, the Patient Safety Together community and resources ensures that frontline staff do not have to “learn the hard way” in isolation, instead, reliable and trusted learning can be spread system-wide.
This mirrors the World Health Organisation’s call for learning health systems, where openness and transparency prevent the same mistake from being repeated in multiple places.
Source: RTE
EQUIPS: Connecting Research with Practice
Another powerful initiative Dr. Flynn is a part of is EQUIPS (Evidence-based Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Research Network). EQUIPS is a network funded by the HSE and the Health Research Board (HRB). It brings together frontline staff and patient voices with researchers, to inform QIPS research priorities and support the adoption of evidence-based change.
This is significant in the global context as the World Health Organisation have previously stressed that evidence must inform action, but too often research and practice remain disconnected. EQUIPS offers a model for closing that gap.
“So that’s the novelty of the EQUIPS network. It brings people from the frontline together with researchers and academics to undertake research, to disseminate research and to create that community.”
Too often, research findings remain in journals whilst frontline staff struggle with the same persistent problems. EQUIPS aims to coordinate and accelerate QIPS research. This networking approach is relatively novel and welcomed since World Health Organisation’s 2024 progress report on patient safety found that only around one-third of countries have managed to establish a strong culture of learning and safety. EQUIPS helps Ireland close this gap by championing, advocating for, and addressing research needs in a collaborative manner. By ensuring that evidence is not just generated but also disseminated and implemented, EQUIPS can accelerate the cycle from knowledge to practice.
A Vision for the Future
Looking ahead, Dr. Flynn emphasises patient partnership, health literacy, and co-production as central to advancing safety in Ireland.
The National Patient Safety Strategy (2019) outlines 13 priority areas—including medication safety, pressure ulcer prevention, infection control, and safeguarding. With a new strategy on the horizon, these focus areas will continue to guide national efforts.
“My immediate response is that the biggest focus is on patient partnership, co-design and co-production. Because we as patients and service users, whether we’re working in healthcare or not, have an enormous invested interest in the quality and safety of the care that we and our families receive and the care that we deliver.
So I think everything that we can do to nurture and support individual patient partnership and then patient partnering on quality improvement initiatives.”
This vision is also reflected in WHO’s findings that meaningful patient engagement can reduce preventable harm by up to 15%, while also restoring trust and dignity for families who experience safety incidents.
Source: WHO Patient Safety Key Facts
Final Reflection
As Dr. Flynn reminds us, patient safety is not just one day focus area —it’s an ongoing journey of learning, collaboration, and improvement.
Through HSE Ireland’s initiatives, from tools like the Competency Navigator to EQUIPS, Ireland is laying strong foundations for safer care
And with patients, families, and professionals working in partnership, the vision of safe care for every newborn and every child moves closer to reality.
“I’m really excited about World Patient Safety Day and look forward to hearing how people are marking this important day and also what they’re going to do. It’s not just one day. It’ll be for the rest of the year until the 17th of September in 2026.”
If you are interested in discovering how MEG can support your organisation in embedding patient safety into everyday practice, our team is here to help.