Standards on paper: what we know, but still don’t practice

Fourteen newborn babies died in a recent hospital fire in Islamabad. The tragedy is devastating not only because of the lives lost, but because of who those patients were: newborns in a place that should be among the safest places in a hospital. Unable to walk, call for help, or escape when something goes wrong. The Centre for Patient Safety at Aga Khan University, through its role as a WHO Collaborating Centre with a focus on implementation research in patient safety, could help facilitate such an effort. The objective should not be for one institution to prescribe solutions to everyone else, but to help create a learning community in which hospitals solve their own problems, measure their progress and share what works, writes Dr Asad Atif, Chair of the Department of Anaesthesiology at Aga Khan University