Patient Safety

The Stockholm Network has been studying healthcare policies since its inception in 1997 with the aim of putting patients and better quality of care at the heart of all its policy recommendations.

Much of our early work focused on the quality of heath systems as a whole and looked at how the funding and organisation of healthcare systems affects patient care.

While we continue to work on these broader issues, our ongoing research work has alerted us to aspects of healthcare which affect patients and their safety - regardless of whether they are treated in a state-funded system or one with more private sources of funding. Issues of safety with regard to travelling abroad for treatment, for example, are becoming more pressing as we move slowly into a world of cross-border healthcare. But so are issues affecting quality of medicines themselves such as the existence and ease of movement of both counterfeit and sub-standard medicines around the globe.

As medical care and treatments become more complex it is often difficult for patients and policymakers to see clearly where potential dangers lie. Questions about pharmacovigilance become more important as do issues such as parallel trade or re-importation of medicines, counterfeiting and the wider regulation of new drugs such as biosimilars.

We feel these questions are deserving of deeper investigation and understanding and it is in this light that we have created a new section of our site bringing together our past work as well as new papers which deal with the above questions.

We hope this research helps to ensure that patient will get access to safe medicines and treatments both now and in the future.

Patient safety publications