Dear Colleagues,

Warm Greetings from LAICO!

We are happy to announce that we are going to conduct a workshop on "Towards safer Eye Care" to be held at LAICO from October 1 - 2, 2014 (Wed – Thurs) as part of this year’s October Summit.

Patient safety is an emerging healthcare discipline, where many healthcare organizations proactively engage themselves to improve safer healthcare for the public. Health care professionals whose focus is on patient safety are very familiar with the alarming and frequently cited statistics from the developed countries. Every year, at least a million people are provided eye care in large volume organizations like ours. Advances in technology and knowledge in the medical field create an immensely complex eye care system. This complexity brings risks, and evidence shows that things will and do go wrong in large volume organizations, sometimes harming the patients, in spite of dedicated and professional staff. This workshop brings together eye hospitals to explore errors in eye hospitals and explore patient safety strategies.

Over the last three years we, at Aravind Eye Hospitals, have been trying to work on improving patient safety within our system. We realize that this is a journey and that we have just begun to take the first steps towards making our hospital a safe place for our patients. We feel that this is the right time to reach out to share the principles of patient safety with other high volume eye care providers in order to make the delivery of eye care safer.

• To increase the awareness of patient safety
• To explore best practices in the field of patient safety
• To understand and improve existing reporting and monitoring systems of errors
• To facilitate the development of a patient safety programme for each participating hospital
• To systematically support the eye care providers to promote safe eye care

Expected Outcomes

This workshop proposes to work with other large eye hospitals in the Indian subcontinent in order to explore errors in eye hospitals and improve patient safety strategies.

• White paper on Patient Safety for eye hospitals

Targeted Audience:

A team comprising doctor, paramedics and administrative staff from eye hospitals

• Patient safety goals
• Learning from mistakes
• Error reporting

We intend to achieve these outcomes through a combination of case presentations, panel discussions and group exercises. Each thematic discussion will start with the presentation of the concept followed by real case presentations, panel discussions and group exercises. A consolidation of the upshots will be documented and shared with the participants in order to support implementation of the learning in their respective institutions.

Funding Support

LAICO is happy to support the cost of your stay for three nights at “Inspiration”, Madurai and food during the workshop. Since the budget available is limited, we request the participants to support the travel cost on their own, although the local transport will be taken care by LAICO.