Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has proposed a National Patient Safety Policy to prevent injury and deaths due to adverse events associated with medicare, hospitalizations, etc.

Launching the AIIMS-WHO National Initiative for Patient Safety in New Delhi, Azad also proposed inclusion of Patient Safety concepts in medical education, National Infection Control Policy and National Accident Prevention Policy. "Approach in this initiative is to be patient centric and there is a lot of hard work, which is to be done by one and all," the minister said.

The health minister emphasized that safety is everyone's business which needs to based on the idea of patient safety and will be focused to 'Patient First Concept'. "In our country, we have lot of national programmes to control and eradicate various diseases and also lot of policies have been enunciated for the same. However for patient safety there is none. So it is time to have a policy in this regard," he said.

Efforts should be made to inculcate culture of safe environment in hospitals where patients and visitors will not be looked upon as customers and will feel safe and secure. Accountability should not be person-oriented but organization-oriented. Learning from others mistakes will help us in preventing medical errors, the minister said.

Azad lamented the absence of solid reliable data in the country in the healthcare sector. He said the ministry has proposed a pilot project for creating a verifiable registry of polio immunization. The data will include contact details including a contact phone number of the inoculated child for physical verification. "Unfortunately, we in India don't have much research data on incidence of the occurrence of preventable errors. We have not kept pace with the developments in this field and have to work now on war footing on this National Initiative," Azad said.