Improving quality and patient SAFEty in surgical care through STandardisation and harmonisation of perioperative care in Europe

Adverse events in health care are suffered by between 8% and 12% of patients admitted to hospitals in the EU and are accountable for around EUR 21 billion in direct costs. Surgical adverse events are one of the most common types reported. The SAFEST project aims at improving and harmonising perioperative patient safety by establishing widely supported perioperative patient-centred EU standardised practices to address this challenge. SAFEST goes beyond state of the art in surgical patient safety by addressing the whole perioperative patient?s pathway (beyond the hospital care), thus ensuring the continuum of care. Patients will participate as co-equal partners throughout the project. Their engagement will start with the broad European consensus, jointly with other key stakeholders, to design the SAFEST standardised practices for perioperative care. The SAFEST standardised practices will be implemented in 10 hospitals from 5 EU countries through a Perioperative Quality Improvement Learning Collaborative (PQILC). Our evaluation of the implementation, both from a process and a results perspective, will allow assessing the impact of the implementation of standardised practices on the improvement of clinical outcomes and to identify contextual facilitators and barriers at micro, meso and macro levels, providing new evidence to translate standardised, evidence-based guidelines to clinical practice. The uptake of the SAFEST standardised practices will be taken a step further by inviting 100 hospitals across EU-27, associated countries and beyond, to self-evaluate and create an international benchmarking assessment.Furthermore, we will ensure that SAFEST makes an impact beyond its lifespan, with ambitious dissemination and exploitation plans that include launching an open-access benchmarking platform for European hospitals and constituting an international network on perioperative patient care.