Patient Safety and Non-Communicable Disease: Challenges and Solutions

The field of patient safety has grown over the past 30 years. We now understand many of the factors that keep people safe from harm during care. At the same time, people are living longer with multiple long-term health conditions, making care more complex. Putting patient safety knowledge into practice has been difficult, especially for people living with Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs) — long-term conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory disease.This series coincides with the World Health Organization's (WHO) theme for World Patient Safety Day (WPSD) 2026-27: Safety and NCDs. WPSD 2026 seeks to reduce preventable harm to people living with NCDs throughout their care. It targets risks including delayed or incorrect diagnosis, medication errors, unsafe medical devices, poorly coordinated handovers between care providers, and barriers such as poverty or discrimination. The campaign calls for integrated care, from the community to hospital, with primary-care-led systems, safer clinical practices, and meaningful involvement of people living with NCDs in designing and managing their own care.The concept is a group of curated papers that address the following questions:• How can we design health services to be safer for people with NCDs?• What role can the study of health systems play in designing and delivering safer care for people with NCDs?• How can patients and families themselves be involved in safety initiatives?• How do we measure outcomes for safer care for people with NCDs?• What are the barriers and enablers of safer care for people with NCDs?• How can safer care be made more equitable?• Application of Implementation Science, quality and safety improvement. • Safe care across the continuum of care.Despite growing evidence, few countries have built patient safety for people with NCDs into national or global health policy, creating a gap between research and real-world practice, that this Research Topic seeks to address.As the WHO's focus on NCDs will run for one year, we invite researchers and practitioners to submit papers focused on solutions for people with long-term conditions who are at risk of harm. The focus will be on how to deliver the campaign's five goals:• Partner with people with lived experience and civil society• Strengthen prevention and risk assessment• Provide early detection, accurate diagnosis and integrated management• Ensure availability and safe use of medicines and devices• Strengthen care coordination, continuity and transitions of careThis collection aims to turn the WHO's five WPSD priorities into practical policy recommendations for preventing and managing harm in people with NCDs.We welcome work applying insights from health systems research and practice to solutions and care delivery. Papers from resource-limited settings are welcomed to ensure the collection has a global reach. We would like papers examining safety in both adult and pediatric populations.The following manuscript types are suitable and aligned with the themes of the WPSD:• Research on any of the themes on safety for people with NCDs• The epidemiology of harm in people with NCDs• The application of insights from health systems research and practice to facilitate safer care and their implications for public health policy and system-level governance• Policy and practice evaluations of interventions to improve safety for people with NCDs• Systematic and narrative reviews, particularly those with a focus on reviewing published interventions that have had impact• View points• Commentaries• Priority-setting and rationale for public health policies addressing patient safety in NCD careWe are interested in publishing solutions and how safety interventions can be implemented in different contexts, including papers from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Papers that include patient partners as authors and patient and public participation will add value to the collection. Topic editors: Peter Lachman, Ezequiel Garcia Elorrio, Paulo Sousa, Marie Elizabeth Ward, Sabelile Tenza Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85370/patient-safety-and-non-communicable-disease-challenges-and-solutions