World Patient Safety Day 2026: Making care safer across HMT
Date published: September 17, 2026
This World Patient Safety Day, we’re sharing some of the work happening at St Hugh’s and Sancta Maria to make care as safe as possible for our patients.
World Patient Safety Day takes place on 17 September and is led by the World Health Organization (WHO). This year’s theme is ‘Safe care for noncommunicable diseases’, with the message ‘Safe care for life!’
The campaign raises awareness of how risks can be reduced throughout a patient’s care. At HMT, one area where we’ve been putting this into practice is before surgery – identifying potential risks sooner and making sure our teams have the right information to make safe decisions.
Reducing same-day cancellations at St Hugh’s
At St Hugh’s, surgical cancellations – particularly those happening on the day of surgery – were identified as an area where changes could make a real difference.
As well as being upsetting and inconvenient for patients, a late cancellation can mean that a concern about someone’s fitness for surgery has only been picked up at the last minute.
Teams from across the hospital came together to look at how this could be improved. Changes included screening patients earlier, only allocating a surgery date once a patient was considered fit for surgery, improving communication between teams and working more closely with community health services to help patients prepare for their procedure.
The results have been encouraging. Surgical cancellations fell from 51 in Quarter 4 of 2024 to 26 in Quarter 3 of 2025 – almost a 50% reduction.
For patients, this means potential concerns can be picked up sooner, giving them and their clinical team more time to address them before surgery rather than discovering an issue on the day.
Safer decision-making at Sancta Maria
At Sancta Maria, teams have also been looking closely at the journey patients take before surgery.
Following learning from a patient safety incident, the hospital reviewed its pre-operative assessment processes and identified areas where information, communication and escalation could be improved.
Pre-assessment teams, ward colleagues, administrators, surgeons, anaesthetists and governance colleagues have all been involved.
Changes have included making sure important clinical information is available earlier in the patient’s journey, clearer processes for escalating concerns and anaesthetic review, and improvements to pathways covering areas such as diabetes, blood testing and difficult airway management.
This means patients who may need further assessment can be identified earlier and clinical teams have better information available when making decisions about their care.
Learning from what happens
The work at the two hospitals started from different challenges, but both have the same aim: to spot risks earlier and make care safer for patients.
They also show why learning from incidents, data and the experiences of our patients and teams matters. When something highlights an opportunity to improve, the important part is what we do with that learning.
This work at both hospitals is a journey. Teams will continue to monitor what is working, what isn’t, review outcomes and make further changes where they are needed. Learning will also continue to be shared across HMT so that improvements made at one site can help inform practice elsewhere.
World Patient Safety Day is a chance to recognise some of this work and, most importantly, the people behind it.
Patient safety isn’t something we focus on for one day. It’s part of the decisions, conversations and actions taking place across our hospitals every day.