Overall Aim
IAPO’s Patient Safety Toolkit aims to equip patient advocates with a basic understanding of a range of important patient safety issues and provide a range of basic information and tools. 

About the Toolkit
IAPO’s Toolkit presents information so patients’ organizations can develop their understanding of the issues and enable them to get involved in information provision to patients and participate in policy debates in a meaningful way to improve patient safety. 

The toolkit includes some new writing and tools but rather than duplicate existing resources, the toolkit  also highlights current resources and provides guidance to patients and patients’ organizations on how to use them. The toolkit focusses on a number of specific patient safety issues for example: Counterfeit Medicines, Risk Benefit Choice, Reuse of Single Use Medical Devices, Medical Errors etc.

Each section of the toolkit has an introduction explaining the issue and guiding the reader through the different materials available.  IAPO is involved in a number of patient safety initiatives and these initiatives are highlighted in the Toolkit (IAPO is on the Steering Group for Patients for Patient Safety, the patient involvement strand of the World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety and a member of the World Health Organization initiated International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce).

Funding
The Patient Safety Toolkit is supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Roche. 

Further information
For further information please contact Jo Groves by emailing policy@patientsorganizations.org.