Celebrating Patient Solidarity Day 2022

On Friday 9th December 2022, health stakeholders from all over the world will stand together, united in celebration of Patient Solidarity Day (PSD). This will be our tenth year of running the PSD in global solidarity and national unity.

On PSD 2022, IAPO members, patients, various healthcare organizations, policy-makers, academia, institutions, industry and other stakeholders will come together to call for medication safety in recognition of the prevalence of medication-related harm. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that medication harm accounts for 50% of the overall preventable harm in medical care.

Every person around the world will, at some point in their life, take medications to prevent or treat illness. However, medications sometimes cause serious harm if incorrectly stored, prescribed, dispensed, administered or if monitored insufficiently.

With medications as the most widely utilized interventions in healthcare, and medication-related harm constituting the greatest proportion of the total preventable harm due to unsafe care, PSD will be a moment to urge everyone to take up safe medication practices to prevent medication errors and reduce medication-related harm.

Medication safety and Antimicrobial Resistance is a critical consideration for patients with multimorbidity and chronic conditions where they have to take a number of medicines together (polypharmacy). In keeping with our commitment to Universal Health Coverage day and Fight the Fakes week, we also want to highlight that medication safety and quality medicines are the corner stones of high impact Universal Health Coverage.

Good antimicrobial resistance stewardship depends upon good medicines prescription and rational use of antibiotics by patients. This is another component of medication safety and prevention of the use of falsified and substandard medicines.

We encourage you to undertake the PSD activities in line with your national Covid-19 public health advice and ensure that vulnerable patients are shielded and not put at risk – mark the day safely!