According to Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), the Ministry has launched the Qatar Patient Safety Classification as part of its strategic work to strengthen patient safety and improve the quality of healthcare services across the country.
MoPH said the Classification is a unified national framework for classifying and analyzing patient safety information and clinical practice excellence across all healthcare facilities in Qatar. It introduces shared concepts that support learning not only from patient safety incidents, but also from successes and examples of outstanding practice.
The Classification serves as the scientific foundation for the National Learning System for Patient Safety Events and Practice Excellence (NLS-PSEP). MoPH noted that it will help standardize health data, strengthen national-level analysis, and support continuous quality improvement across the health system.
MoPH added that the framework aligns with Qatar National Vision 2030 and the National Health Strategy 2024–2030, and applies to all governmental, semi-governmental, and private healthcare facilities. It is intended for use by healthcare professionals, quality and patient safety teams, risk management teams, health leaders, regulators, and healthcare decision-makers.
Dr. Eman Radwan, Acting Director of MoPH’s Healthcare Quality Department, said the launch is a major step toward improving healthcare quality and building a stronger culture of safety at the system level. She also noted that a national team developed the Classification, bringing together experts in healthcare quality and patient safety from both the public and private sectors in a partnership-based, integrated approach.
MoPH explained that the Classification is intended to standardize patient safety concepts and taxonomies across the health system, strengthen national learning and reduce repeat incidents, improve risk management, enable comparative analysis and evidence-informed decision-making, and enhance transparency and public confidence in health services. MoPH also said implementation will support efforts to raise patient safety levels, strengthen a learning culture across providers, and reduce potential risks and harm at both facility and national levels.
MoPH emphasized that the Classification is among the first national classifications in the region to combine learning from experience and practice excellence in a single framework. It supports digital transformation through the development of an intelligent national patient safety database and reflects a participatory national approach to strengthening healthcare quality and patient safety over the long term. The framework includes more than 25 main categories of patient safety incidents, including medication-related incidents, falls, infection prevention and control, surgical incidents, and medical procedure-related incidents.
The Classification is based on four interconnected levels that integrate with digital reporting systems. These include domains that cover both patient safety incidents and excellence in practice; severity and impact, assessing how events affect patients, staff, and organizations; contributory factors and causes, identifying what leads to incidents to help prevent recurrence; and corrective and preventive actions, documenting responses and their effectiveness. MoPH said the Classification is also designed to support interoperability through application programming interfaces (APIs).
MoPH stated that the Qatar Patient Safety Classification went through several stages before launch, including development through reviewing and adapting international best practices, review and refinement through multidisciplinary workshops, implementation through embedding it within the National Learning System with training and technical support and early adoption by healthcare institutions, and a sustainability phase through a governance mechanism that will be reviewed and updated regularly to keep pace with national and regional developments.