The Global State of Patient Safety 2025 report makes it clear that patient safety is “everyone’s business.”

While it highlights progress globally, it also shows how powerful high quality data can be in identifying areas for improvement and revealing opportunities to learn from others. Over the coming weeks, RLDatix will explore these learning opportunities through a series of webinars and articles.

Several themes immediately stand out as particularly relevant and thought provoking for further discussion:

Action on mental health patient safety

There is a clear need to focus on how learning can reverse the trend in mortality for people with severe mental illness. At RLDatix, our mission is to raise the standard of care… everywhere. Seeing this stark data strengthens our commitment to working more closely with customers delivering mental health care across all settings, supporting them to reverse this alarming trend.

Waiting times as a patient safety issue

Waiting must become part of the mainstream patient safety conversation. While the report shows that waiting times are returning to pre-pandemic levels globally, and following the positive news from NHS England earlier this month NHS England » Second biggest drop in NHS waiting list in 15 years amid record number of patients, it is encouraging to see growing focus on how patient safety is experienced by those waiting for care. There is a clear opportunity to collect and use data on people’s safety during extended waits, not just after care is delivered.

Maternal and neonatal care: progress and challenge

There is hope in maternal and neonatal care, with maternal deaths, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths continuing to fall globally. However, if the UK matched Japan’s neonatal mortality rate, there could have been 1,123 fewer neonatal deaths in 2023. We await the outcomes of the investigation led by Baroness Amos.

Data as an enabler, but only if it’s the right data

The report acknowledges that current insight is still largely a hospital-based view of safety, with persistent blind spots in primary, community, and long-term care. This is a challenge RLDatix is actively focused on addressing. As care continues to shift from hospital to community settings, and as the profile of caregivers evolves alongside this shift, new thinking and new models of safety intelligence will be essential.

Patient safety systems must reflect new care models

We welcome the call to action for patient safety to be “everyone’s responsibility.” Patient safety and quality technology must support a system-wide view of safety, beyond single organisations or professions , making system-based safety and quality accessible across organisations, settings, teams, and pathways.

You cannot separate patient safety from workforce and culture

Safe staffing, culture, and workforce planning are core patient safety issues, not just operational challenges. We have long known that without the right people, delivering the right care, with the right outcomes, even the best clinical systems fail. This is picked up in the 16 proposed ambitions for national patient safety systems and we look forward to leading the innovations in this vital area.

Beyond the report: from lagging to leading indicators

The report also reinforces the need for more leading indicators and more dynamic, operational benchmarking of patient safety data. Lagging indicators are valuable for comparison, but leading indicators act as early warning systems, enabling early intervention, real-time learning, and safety improvement at the point of care delivery.

Financial context of patient safety

We cannot ignore the financial reality in which the UK and Ireland are operating. The report’s insights sit against a backdrop of unprecedented financial pressure on health and care systems. The human cost is clear, but the report also offers a powerful message of hope: patient safety can be a driver of financially sustainable care delivery, not just a moral imperative.

Norway, which tops the patient safety league table, achieves this while spending less on healthcare as a percentage of GDP, demonstrating that safer care and financial sustainability are not competing goals.

Patient safety truly is everyone’s business and, encouragingly, as highlighted at the HFMA conference in December, it is the Chief Finance Officer’s business too.

This work matters. As James Titcombe OBE, Chief Executive of Patient Safety Watch and one of the report’s authors, said:

“Behind every statistic in this report is a person who should still be alive, and a family whose lives have been permanently changed. The gap between where the UK is on patient safety and where we could be, if we matched the best performing health system represents around 22,000 lives every year. That’s 60 lives every day.”

We look forward to hearing from customers and partners about their key takeaways from the report, and to working together to explore practical, meaningful ways to drive further improvement.