Patient & food safety: injury facts

The figures

Who is most affected

Anyone who receives care. WHO reports that around 1 in every 10 patients is harmed in health care, and that more than 3 million deaths a year are due to unsafe care. Above 50% of that harm — 1 in every 20 patients — is preventable, and half of the preventable harm is attributed to medications.

Harm is not confined to hospitals. WHO cites estimates that as many as 4 in 10 patients are harmed in primary and ambulatory settings, with up to 80% of that harm avoidable.

For food, the burden lands hardest on the youngest. WHO reports that children under 5 carry 29% of the health burden of unsafe food.

Where and how it happens

WHO lists the common adverse events plainly: medication errors, unsafe surgical procedures, health care-associated infections, diagnostic errors, patient falls, pressure ulcers, patient misidentification, unsafe blood transfusion and venous thromboembolism.

Its central point is that these are not, in the main, the failures of individuals. Most mistakes that lead to harm come from system and process failures that put clinicians in a position to make them — so the response WHO recommends is to redesign the system rather than to look for someone to blame, without overlooking negligence where it exists.

Unsafe food follows a different route into the body but the same logic. WHO reports an estimated 866 million people falling ill after eating contaminated food each year and 1.52 million dying, from hazards that range from bacteria and viruses to heavy metals and naturally occurring toxins.

What it costs

WHO estimates that patient harm potentially reduces global economic growth by 0.7% a year, and that the indirect cost runs to trillions of US dollars.

It also reports that investing in reducing harm pays back — and gives patient engagement as an example of a good return, capable of reducing the burden of harm when it is done properly.

Why there is a day for this

Patient safety became a formal global health priority in May 2019, when the World Health Assembly adopted a resolution on global action on patient safety. That resolution created World Patient Safety Day, observed on 17 September each year, and asked WHO to develop a global patient safety action plan with its Member States.

So the observance is not a promotional exercise. It is the visible part of a commitment governments made to measure avoidable harm and reduce it.

What prevents it

• Leadership that commits to safety, and a culture in which safety is genuinely prioritised. WHO puts this first in its description of what a safe health system does.
• A safe working environment, and procedures and clinical processes designed to be safe, rather than safe only when everyone is having a good day.
• Building the competencies of health and care workers, and improving teamwork and communication between them — WHO's second and third pillars.
• Engaging patients and families in policy development, research and shared decision-making. WHO names patient engagement as one of the better returns on investment available in this field.
• Incident reporting systems whose purpose is learning and continuous improvement, not attribution of blame.
• For food: risk-based regulatory frameworks and effective national food safety systems, which WHO says governments should prioritise.
• For food handlers and consumers: WHO's Five keys to safer food, used at home, in restaurants and at local markets, and its Five keys to growing safer fruits and vegetables for producers.
• National food control systems and surveillance strong enough to detect and respond to a problem, which is what WHO's own food safety work is built to support.

How to read these numbers

• The patient safety figures come from a WHO fact sheet dated 11 September 2023 and draw on published systematic reviews rather than a single count. WHO shows a range where the underlying studies disagree — the primary and ambulatory figure, for example, is an estimate with wide bounds.
• "Harm" and "preventable harm" are not the same measure. A known complication of a necessary procedure counts as harm; only some of it was avoidable. Quote the preventable share when you want to talk about what a safety programme can change.
• WHO's food safety estimates were restated in 2026 and are much higher than the figures WHO published a decade earlier. That is a change in method and in the number of hazards covered, not a sudden change in the world. Never present the old and new figures as a trend.
• Both sets of figures on this page are worldwide estimates. A country's own patient safety indicators are collected differently — from incident reports, chart reviews or claims — and will not match.

The observances that campaign on this

Sources cited on this page

1. World Health Organization — Patient safety (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.
2. World Health Organization — Food safety (fact sheet) — www.who.int, read 29 September 2026.