WASHINGTON – WASHINGTON -- Top health leaders from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States met here Thursday to sign a letter of intent to support patient safety efforts.

The World Health Organization Action on Patient Safety Initiative, known as the "High 5s Project," seeks to improve the safety of patients around the world. The WHO's Collaborating Centre is coordinating the project.

The centerpiece of the High 5s Project involves the development and implementation of standardized operating protocols to address five widespread patient safety problems in the participating countries and elsewhere.

The protocols seek to:

• Promote effective management of concentrated injectable medicines;

• Assure medication accuracy at transitions in care;

• Improve communications during patient care handovers;

• Assure performance of the correct procedure at the correct body site;

• Promote improved hand hygiene to prevent healthcare-associated infections.

"Information technology can play an important role in supporting safer healthcare," Agnes Leotsakos, MD, a member of WHO's World Alliance for Patient Safety said in June when the WHO first announced its patient safety initiative. "For example, use of technology to verify patient identification through technologies such as bar coding."

Four of the five protocols have been finalized and approved by the participating countries. The fifth will be finalized within the next month. Once in place, they are expected to have broad impacts in preventing avoidable deaths and serious injuries in hospitals.

The protocols will be used in hospitals in the partner countries, over the next five years and their impact will be monitored, said Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer of England and chairman of the WHO World Alliance for Patient Safety. "The interest and commitment being shown by the participating countries to implement these solutions is inspiring," he said. "Over the years to come, risks to patients will be reduced, lives will be saved and many lessons learned as a result of the High 5s action being initiated in Washington D.C., today."

Project implementation is targeted for late summer of 2008, with the expectation that its impacts will be assessed over a five-year period.

"This initiative is best characterized as an applied research project in standardizing patient care processes to improve patient safety, and in evaluating the impacts thereof," says Dennis S. O'Leary, MD, president, The Joint Commission. "The challenges and opportunities inherent in this initiative have created great excitement and enthusiasm among the participating countries."

The Joint Commission and Joint Commission International, in partnership with the WHO World Alliance for Patient Safety and the Commonwealth Fund, lead the WHO Collaborating Centre on Patient Safety.

High 5s project 

Further information on the work of the Alliance