World Patient Safety Day 2026
World Patient Safety Day is important to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. The 2026 theme is “safe care for non-communicable diseases” accompanied by the strapline “safe care for life!”. As my penultimate blog as Dean of the Faculty of Dental Surgery and Vice-President (Dental), this is an apt topic.
At first glance, the discussion of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) may bring cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease to mind. Yet oral diseases are themselves among the most prevalent NCDs in the world and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has articulated on many occasions that dental caries, periodontal disease, edentulousness (partial or full) and oral cancer are among the major conditions contributing to the burden associated with NCDs.
Non-communicable oral diseases affect 3.5 billion people, 45 percent of the world’s population. More worryingly, 2.5 billion people are affected by untreated dental caries, one billion have severe periodontal diseases and 514 million children have untreated dental disease in the primary dentition. The current WHO Global Burden of Disease analysis indicates that 353 million people are edentulous, but the data are skewed where edentulousness affects 23% of adults over the age of 60. Furthermore, head and neck cancer is a major global health problem, with approximately one million new cases diagnosed worldwide each year.
The challenge associated with the scale of oral disease means that we need to continue to deal with these conditions on a number of fronts. Exploring and encouraging new ways of prevention is key. But so is avoiding the consequences of failure to adequately diagnose and treat oral disease along with effective treatment. Coupled with these aspects, there are major challenges for humanity in relation to the environmental impact of dental care and the inequalities which remain to be adequately addressed in many countries. These are by no means simple, and a blog article does not do adequate justice to their population health impact.
To introduce another theme of this blog, we often think about patient safety in relation to an appointment or episode of care. Whilst important, this is not the whole story, and patient safety should not be restricted to an individual procedure or episode of care, but to the treatment pathway and indeed encompass holistic patient care from cradle to grave. Indeed, there is also an underreported issue with patient safety in relation to NCDs. The chronic and long-term nature of NCDs means patients may repeatedly interact with healthcare systems. This creates opportunities for unintended harm at multiple stages of the patient journey including prevention, detection, diagnosis, treatment, long-term management and during personal care regimes. Moreover, it has been estimated by the WHO that around one in every ten patients experiences harm during healthcare with approximately half being wholly preventable. Worrying statistics indeed.
Therefore, the longitudinal nature of patient safety in dentistry and oral healthcare is an important way of thinking about improving outcomes and population health. And although dentists do not universally take the Hippocratic Oath around the globe, the ethical principles traditionally attributed to the statement, including beneficence, non-maleficence, respect for autonomy and confidentiality are embedded within contemporary standards of dental professionalism in the UK and beyond. Nobody in the dental team goes to work to cause patient harm, but we know iatrogenic harm inadvertently occurs at times. Patient safety in dentistry therefore needs to be refocused from the simplistic concept of preventing dramatic adverse events to encapsulate the prevention of the accumulation of smaller harms over a lifetime of oral healthcare.
All laudable concepts but easier said than done? Safe care for NCDs must therefore include safe oral healthcare and importantly, safety is a journey, not an appointment. Moreover, there is another apposite point about the phrase “Safe care for life” for dentistry. As noted above, oral healthcare is part of the course of life; from prevention and childhood oral health, through adult oral health and increasingly complex care for older people who are keen to retain their natural dentition.
It means getting the diagnosis right. Prescribing appropriately. Taking the correct radiograph for the correct clinical situation. Preventing wrong-site treatment. Recognising deteriorating oral health. Communicating effectively. Maintaining infection prevention standards. Understanding the patient's medical history and medicines. Making appropriate referrals and ensuring that these referrals are acted upon. Coupled with this, one of the key messages I want to reiterate through this blog for World Patient Safety Day 2026 is that oral health and general health must not be considered as separate entities. I am sure you do not need to be reminded that dental caries and periodontal diseases are both markers of general health and wellbeing and are intrinsically linked to systemic disease. The common risk factor approach for many diseases (tobacco use, alcohol consumption and high levels of free dietary sugars) is logical and as these are modifiable, the time is right to reconsider the causative agents as well as diseases and treatment as part of the patient safety programme. This creates a series of opportunities for dentistry that extend well beyond treating the oral cavity by going upstream.
Every dental consultation can potentially contribute to the prevention and early detection of NCDs. Health coaching is known to be efficient and as patients are more regular attenders at dental than at medical appointments, dental teams should not only continue to signpost patients who exhibit systemic disease to the appropriate healthcare professional, but to consider the broad impact of polypharmacy when recording a medical history and notice the subtle changes in health that adversely affect the safety of dental treatment. Coupled with this, the increasing prevalence of multimorbidity means that the dental patient could well be receiving treatment from multiple different arms of health services. Integration rather than isolation is key to patient safety.
At this point, I am going to reiterate the argument for disease prevention to be actively promoted as one of the most important elements of patient safety for non-communicable diseases in oral health. Prevention is always better than cure and is therefore the most effective patient safety measure of all as the safest treatment is that which is never needed.
Accurate and timely diagnosis, medicines safety and continuity are all crucial elements of providing safe care. Technical excellence is pointless if follow-up fails, information-sharing is poor, or care is fragmented. Indeed, the latter is considered as a major issue by the WHO as one source of increasing the risk of harm for people affected by NCDs. Patients must also be partners in safety. Passive participation never leads to good care outcomes, and this is also true for safety, where shared decision-making, health literacy and patient engagement in care all contribute to eliminating mistakes, small or large. These principles will feel very familiar to those involved in the dental industry.
Systems and processes are part of the architecture of patient safety as well. Checklists, pathways, antimicrobial stewardship, clinical audit, incident reporting, interdisciplinary working, appropriate supervision and the establishment of a culture where dental team members can raise concerns before errors escalate, can all contribute to learning to deliver safer care. Understanding human factors, communication, professionalism, teamworking, decision-making and the recognition of and management of risk are all important.
Another dimension of relevance to this year's theme for dentistry is that oral diseases are not distributed equally. The disproportionate burden of disease among socially and economically underserved populations is compounded by inequalities persisting throughout life and across all domains of care from prevention through diagnosis to appropriate care. Addressing oral health inequalities and improving patient safety should therefore be synergistic ambitions rather than separate concepts.
As a result, the challenge for the dental profession is broader than simply providing safe dental procedures. The creation of safe oral healthcare systems needs to be at the top of everyone’s agenda. Systems for preventing, diagnosing and prescribing for oral disease are crucial. But, effective communication with health partners and a culture of learning from mishaps are also essential along with increasing the integration of oral and general healthcare, addressing inequalities and involving patients as active partners in health decisions.
In 2026, World Patient Safety Day asked us to consider safe care for non-communicable diseases. For dentistry our contribution could easily be summarised simply as “safe mouth, safe patient, safe care for life”. Our actions will continue to produce health dividends for patients, but also in terms of measurable global outcomes aligned to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Of these, patient safety in dentistry is aligned very closely with number three “good health and wellbeing”, but it is also a valuable contributor to ten of the remaining SDGs. Quite simply, patient safety is a prerequisite for the prevention of avoidable harm, improves health, reduces inequalities and avoids the unnecessary consumption of healthcare resources arising from NCDs in dentistry. With 45 per cent of the world population having one or more non-communicable oral diseases, there is still work to do.
Your voice is important in shaping the Faculty of Dental Surgery. I am always happy to hear from you dental@rcsed.ac.uk.