Global Patient Safety Report 2026

What is the Global Patient Safety Report 2026?

The Global Patient Safety Report 2026 is an independent, evidence-based account of the challenges facing patient safety today, drawn from 200 senior leaders across the UK, Ireland and the Middle East. It identifies ten themes that recur in every healthcare system, whatever the local regulatory framework.

Between February and June 2026, Ideagen convened these leaders, chief executives, chief nurses, medical directors, and the heads of patient safety, governance and risk, across five cities and three countries. We did not set out to survey them. We set out to listen. And what emerged was striking: whether an organisation answers to PSIRF and LFPSE, to Ireland's Patient Safety Act 2023, or to Gulf accreditation, the same ten challenges surfaced again and again, from the frontline where safety data is created to the boardroom where it drives decisions.

Why does patient safety need a report like this?

Because the frameworks change at every border, but the challenges do not. Leaders everywhere are wrestling with the same problems, yet each tends to face them alone, assuming their difficulties are local. Seeing the ten themes set out together reframes them: not ten isolated problems to be firefought, but one connected system to be improved.

This is not a product brochure, and it is not a set of predictions. It is a record of what senior patient safety leaders said, in their own words, about the problems they face and where they believe the answers lie, drawn from workshops, live sessions and the experiences organisations chose to share.

What are the ten themes of patient safety?

The ten themes are the ten challenges that determine how well any organisation keeps patients safe, grouped into three stages: capturing safety at the frontline, making sense of it, and staying ahead of harm.

• Culture, fear and psychological safety. Whether staff feel safe to speak up at all, the single biggest determinant of whether incidents are ever reported.
• The reporting burden. Why forms and processes so often discourage the very behaviour they exist to enable.
• Data quality. The point at which good intentions most often quietly come undone.
• Fragmentation. The universal problem of systems that hold real information but do not connect.
• Triangulation. Seeing incidents, risks, complaints and audits as one picture rather than separate records.
• Data-rich, insight-poor. Closing the "so what?" gap between having data and knowing what to do.
• Closing the loop. Turning insight into action that lands, and learning that spreads.
• From reactive to proactive. Moving upstream, from documenting harm to preventing it.
• AI in patient safety. Real appetite, real caution, and how to adopt it safely.
• Oversight, ward to board. Live, trusted visibility in place of data that is weeks out of date.

What results are healthcare organisations already achieving?

Organisations that have tackled these challenges are reporting measurable gains, and the report evidences each in their own words. Among them: incident reporting time cut by up to 90%; incident-completion compliance lifted from a third to nine in ten; complaint responses hit on time three months running; and fourteen separate safeguarding spreadsheets consolidated into one connected view.

None of these came from a single feature. Each came from treating patient safety not as a series of disconnected problems, but as one connected system.