safety and quality. Continuing attention needs to be paid to the education and training of individual clinicians regarding the unique decision‐making, assessment, and team skills necessary to provide excellent care for older people. We should be particularly mindful of strategies for the early detection, prevention, and management of the geriatric syndromes and effective ways of tailoring treatment to the individual. Crucially, safety and quality of care will also be enhanced if the ongoing problems with ageism and attitudes toward older people and their care can be addressed.
Acknowledgement
The Centre for Patient Safety and Service Quality, Imperial College London, is funded by the National Institute for Health Research.
Key points
Older people are more vulnerable than younger patients to healthcare‐associated harm and its consequences. This tendency is associated with frailty and comorbidity rather than age alone – as our populations age, systems of care need to be designed with this in mind.
Older people experience a wider range of adverse events than their younger counterparts in the hospital, including the geriatric syndromes, yet patient safety in this population is comparatively under‐researched.
There is a need to improve the measurement of safety and quality of care in older people and to better understand patient safety for older people in non‐hospital settings.
Key areas of focus for improving patient safety for older people include designing safer healthcare systems for older people; the early detection, prevention, and management of the geriatric syndromes; providing education to individual clinicians to enhance decision‐making, assessment, and team skills; and efforts to reduce ageism and negative attitudes toward older people and their care.
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