The theme of this year’s World Patient Safety Day, being held on Wednesday 17th September 2025, is “Safe care for every newborn and every child“.
Every child has the right to safe, quality health care — from the very beginning. Yet, newborns and young children face higher risks due to their rapid development, evolving health needs and different disease patterns. They rely on adults to speak up and make decisions for them. Children may also face added challenges depending on their socio-economic circumstances, such as not being able to get the care they need. These factors make them more susceptible to harm if care isn’t specifically adapted to their age, size, health condition and context.
A single safety incident can have lifelong consequences for a child’s health and development. That’s why World Patient Safety Day 2025 is dedicated to ensuring safe care for every newborn and child, with a special focus on those from birth to nine years old. This year’s slogan, “Patient safety from the start!”, emphasizes the urgent need to act early and consistently to prevent harm throughout childhood, and yield benefits across the life course.
WHO World Patient Safety Day campaign informationThere are a wide range of campaign materials and logos to use in your local organisations, which can be found by clicking here.
Children are overrepresented in reports to haemovigilance organisations. SHOT has had a separate Paediatric chapter since 2007; recognising the unique challenges for transfusion medicine in this age group. The Paediatric cumulative data page, brings together all paediatric SHOT data and resources. This includes reporting definitions, summary of annual reported numbers, latest key findings from the Annual SHOT Report, available resources (including cases studies, figures and relevant SHOT bites or videos) and finally the pdf versions of the paediatric chapters from the Annual SHOT Reports.
