The importance of patient safety is a growing awareness among healthcare practitioners all over the world. The College of Nursing continuously seeks to equip its educators with the most current and relevant updates in the practice of patient safety. Its aim is to incorporate doable recommendations that would enhance the curriculum in the area of education and practice of patient safety based on current international standards with the end goal of producing nursing graduates who will be globally competitive.

Last June 25-26, 2015, Dean Carmel Villegas was sent as a delegate in the First ASEAN Patient Safety Congress -Towards a Unified Approach to Patient Safety: The ASEAN Perspective. Her strong recommendations to highlight safety standards early on in the content of core professional nursing subjects were validated by the exigency expressed by varied resource speakers during the sessions.

The valuable insights gained will help guide the direction of educators in teaching nursing leadership and management by adapting the new paradigm of safety in the light of improving systems and processes versus carrying on the traditional punitive or blame culture we have known. The title of the highlighted plenary session, “To err is human: are our health systems Safe for Patients?” actually says it all.

-CAV