Egypt launches national patient safety strategy for 2026-2030: Minister

Health Minister Khaled Abdel Ghaffar said Egypt had launched a national quality and patient safety strategy for 2026-2030 as part of efforts to reduce medical errors, improve healthcare standards and establish institutional systems for reporting adverse events and learning from them.

Speaking at an event marking World Patient Safety Day, Abdel Ghaffar said patient safety had become a central priority for health systems. He added that Egypt was seeking to integrate quality standards across the continuum of care, from primary healthcare and public health initiatives to intensive care and waiting-list programmes.

The minister said the ministry had introduced a medical liability and patient safety law, established a dedicated patient safety department and formed a higher committee bringing together healthcare providers from the public, military, police and private sectors, alongside civil society organisations.

Abdel Ghaffar added that the ministry had prepared its first comprehensive patient safety report for 2025 to establish a baseline against which future performance could be measured.

He called for a nationwide confidential reporting system for adverse events and medical errors, emphasising that the aim should be institutional learning rather than punishment. Healthcare workers, he said, needed to be able to report mistakes without fear.

The ministry has also launched a professional diploma in patient safety in cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO), with 70 doctors enrolled in the first cohort.

Abdel Ghaffar also highlighted Egypt’s public health achievements, including WHO certifications related to the elimination of malaria and trachoma, as well as maintaining what the ministry described as gold-level certification linked to hepatitis C elimination. He said sustaining these gains through regular screening remained a key challenge.

Meanwhile, Ahmed Taha, head of the General Authority for Healthcare Accreditation and Regulation (GAHAR), said the authority had accredited 964 healthcare facilities across 27 governorates and registered more than 122,000 healthcare professionals.

He added that GAHAR had reviewed 616 healthcare facility design projects and trained around 37,000 participants. Its standards and surveyor-training programmes had also received international accreditation from the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua).

Presidential health adviser Mohamed Awad Tag El-Din said patient safety could not be separated from the safety of healthcare workers. He stressed that healthcare quality should be assessed by outcomes and the prevention of harm, rather than by the number of hospitals or beds alone.

WHO Representative in Egypt Sadhana Bhagwat said the establishment of GAHAR had helped put quality and patient safety at the centre of healthcare reform, including within Egypt’s universal health insurance system.