Table 1

'In Safe Hands 24/7’

Norwegian National Patient Safety Campaign (2011–2013) and Program (2014–2018)
Patient safety target areas

  • Safety culture.

  • Surgical safety checklist.

  • Medication conciliations.

  • Prevention of falls.

  • Prevention of decubitus.

  • Prevention of malnutrition.

  • Prevention of urinary tract infections.

  • Prevention of blood stream infections.

  • Prevention of suicides.

  • Prevention of overdose mortality.

  • National early warning score.*

  • Early detection of sepsis.*

  • Stroke treatment.

  • Safe discharge.*

  • Management of patient safety.

Campaign/programme impact on safety culture and implementation of the Surgical Safety Checklist

  • Measures of compliance, how to do data collection, to observe process metrics and how to report to the programme.

  • The checklist itself with available tools.

  • Evidence base for the checklist (review) with presentations and reports from the pilot available for use.

  • Additional material available for education of staff with videos and e-learning course to use for implementation.

  • Safety culture surveys.

  • Learn managers to handle patient safety.


The WHO Surgical Safety Checklist was the first target area of the programme.
Management of the programme
Annual national patient safety meetings, regional meetings, national action plans, quality and improvement tools and seminars are readily available for use by managers and hospital staff and clinicians. Global trigger tool is used in all hospitals by trained staff to measure patient harm, and data are published on the safety programme’s web site.†
Local adaption of programme in surgical wards and operating theatres
Patient safety units at hospital level handle the patient safety programme in collaboration with managers and clinicians. In meetings, the CEO feeds clinical directors and frontline managers with metrics on prevention of falls, decubitus and malnutrition for surgical wards and on the Surgical Safety Checklist for operating theatre managers. Then theatre managers provide feedback on compliance rates of the Surgical Safety Checklist to their clinical staff. Feedback also includes guidelines for checklist use and clinical audits that are used for monitoring quality of checklist performance and quality improvement. Local adaptations of the checklist are performed with multidisciplinary collaboration and stakeholders.