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To guide regional healthcare and patient safety leaders in implementing and advancing the Global Patient Safety Action Plan (GPSAP), SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute for Patient Safety & Quality (IPSQ) developed the Global Action for Leaders and Learning Organisations on Patient Safety (GALLOPS) programme. The curriculum mapped to GPSAP and its objectives are:

• Enhance awareness and promote understanding of GPSAP for leaders and healthcare professionals at every level up to the point of care.
  
• Assess current healthcare practices, identify areas for improvement and priorities for actions among the various strategies in GPSAP.
  
• Learn from each other, share, harness & adapt best practices.
  
• Work towards developing good strategies and effective contextualized implementation of needed areas in every country in the world especially Asia

The inaugural GALLOPS programme was held in October 2021 (programme), virtually with over 120 participants from 10 countries in the region. Speakers from the World Health Organization, Ministry of Health, National Healthcare Group, National University Health System and Singapore Health Services shared on a wide spectrum of topics ranging from Policies to Eliminate Avoidable Harm, Patient Safety Training, Build High Reliability Health Systems, Patient and Family Engagement and many more.

In November 2022, patient safety and quality leaders attended Part 2 of the GALLOPS programme (programme), held in Singapore from 7 – 11 November 2022. It was well-attended by 90 participants from 12 countries in the region. They heard from invited speakers from the World Health Organisation, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Singapore, visited Singapore Health Services (SingHealth) hospitals and SingHealth Duke-NUS Institute for Medical Simulations, and attempted a self-assessment on GPSAP representing their health facility level. Each participant also shortlisted 3 areas of improvement and in groups presented details on 1 area of improvement through the use of a quality improvement tool (i.e., driver diagram) that was taught at the workshop, to illustrate potential change ideas and preliminary action plan where they can bring back to their facilities to advocate and implement the selected area of improvement after the programme.

A Leadership Dialogue was organised, where the participants discussed the course of action for implementing and advancing the GPSAP. Specific objectives of the leadership dialogue were to:

1. seek commitment and support from partners for concrete actions to implement the action plan.
   
2. clarify concerns and hear challenges from partners and identify priority where WHO Patient Safety Flagship Unit can provide technical guidance and tools required to support the implementation of common action plan for the countries in this region.
   
3. promote the sharing of best practices/ case studies in the global knowledge patient safety sharing platform and through GALLOPS Ambassador Network.

The GALLOPS Ambassador Network has been established since 2021. The network will continue to grow, thrive and spread GPSAP to healthcare facilities and stakeholders in each country with GALLOPS Ambassador Network representatives.

Please contact us at SingHealth Duke-NUS Gallops (SHHQ) [email protected] if you wish to know more about GALLOPS. You may also download a copy of the full written report on GALLOPS here. Thank you.