Key takeaways
- World Patient Safety Day 2026 (17 September) marks the seventh year of the WHO campaign, with the theme "Safe care for noncommunicable diseases" and the slogan "Safe care for life!"
- Noncommunicable diseases account for roughly three quarters of deaths worldwide, and globally 1 in 10 patients are harmed while receiving care, with about half of that harm considered preventable.
- Around 40% of Indeemo's healthcare and pharma research involves people living with long-term conditions that map onto the NCD definition, even though almost none of it was designed as patient safety research.
- The pattern across these studies points to three things: safety risk lives in daily routine, so research needs to run over time; video shows what interviews miss; and patients notice problems that never make it into an incident report.
- Indeemo's Catalyst team can help build patient safety questions into NCD-focused research design.
On 17 September, landmarks around the world will glow orange in support of the seventh World Patient Safety Day, including the Jet d'Eau in Geneva, WHO's flagship illumination this year. This year's WHO theme is "Safe care for noncommunicable diseases," with the slogan "Safe care for life!" The framing matters. Noncommunicable diseases account for roughly three quarters of deaths worldwide, and globally one in ten patients is harmed while receiving care, with about half of that harm considered preventable.
Globally, 1 in 10 patients is harmed while receiving care, and about half of that harm is considered preventable.
What makes NCD safety different from other patient safety challenges is duration. A person with osteoarthritis, COPD, lupus or type 2 diabetes is not passing through the health system once. They are living inside it for years, across multiple settings, mostly on their own. WHO is explicit that safety risks arise at every stage, from prevention and diagnosis through treatment and long-term management, and that they arise in homes and communities as well as in clinics. The campaign asks stakeholders to engage people living with NCDs as partners in identifying those risks.
That last point is where qualitative research earns its place in the conversation. If most of the risk sits in the space between appointments, the evidence has to be gathered there too.
What does patient research reveal about NCD safety risks?
Yes, even though patient safety wasn't the original brief. Looking back at Indeemo's healthcare and pharma research, a consistent pattern of diagnostic delay, medication and device workarounds, and fragile care transitions shows up across studies that were never designed to look for it.
Looking across Indeemo's healthcare and pharma research, around 40% of it involves people living with long-term conditions that fall inside or alongside the NCD definition: cancers, chronic respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, metabolic and weight-related conditions, autoimmune and inflammatory disease, kidney disease, chronic pain, and mental health.
Almost none of them were designed as patient safety studies. They were commissioned to understand lived experience, treatment journeys, unmet need and communication gaps. Read together with the WHO framing in mind, they map closely onto the safety risks the campaign is trying to surface.
Diagnosis and the long road to it
A multi-country patient journey study with people diagnosed with lung and skin cancer ran across the UK, Austria, France, Spain, Sweden and Canada, tracing first symptoms, first doctor visits, pre-diagnosis testing, diagnosis day itself and the monitoring that followed. A separate ethnography with people living with a rare respiratory and liver condition documented the diagnosis journey alongside daily symptoms and infusion therapy. Diagnostic delay and diagnostic error are among the most common sources of preventable harm, and participants describe the sequence in a level of detail that no clinical record captures.
Medication and device safety in real conditions
Several studies asked participants to record every single use of a treatment as it happened: a ten-day diary capturing each application of a topical pain relief gel, including storage, reminders and aftercare; a seven-day diary study with people managing asthma through inhalers, pharmacy visits and daily routines; a four-week trial in which allergy patients carried a demonstration version of a needle-free emergency treatment and filmed timed videos confirming whether they actually had it with them. Carry rates, technique, storage and workarounds are safety behaviours, and they are visible on video in a way they are not in a self-report questionnaire.
Transitions of care
A four-week longitudinal diary study followed heart failure patients immediately after hospital discharge, tracking medication, diet, contact with healthcare teams, emotional wellbeing and the early signals associated with readmission risk. Another followed people recovering from acute kidney injury after cardiac surgery at 7 days, 30 days, one year and 18 months. Handover from hospital to home is one of the most fragile points in any care pathway, and both studies were positioned exactly there.
Long-term self-management
Foundational insight studies with knee osteoarthritis patients ran in the United States, Germany and Saudi Arabia, with participants reporting morning, midday and evening so the research could see how the condition and the coping changed through the day. This is the same territory our guide to diary studies for patient experience research covers in more depth. A ten-week study with adults living with sickle cell disease covered healthcare visits, pain crises, treatment reviews and support systems. A seven-day ethnography with people living with COPD and bronchiectasis covered diagnosis, medication use and healthcare interactions. Multiple studies with people using GLP-1 medications documented changes to eating, alcohol and daily routine.
Health information and the right to question care
One UK study asked people living with cancer to think aloud while screen recording their search for information about their rights and choices in their own care, across charity, health service and patient watchdog websites. Another captured how people seeking weight management support search for and judge online health content. WHO asks patients to speak up when something does not feel right. These studies show how hard it can be to find out what you are entitled to ask for in the first place.
Caregivers as part of the safety system
Studies with caregivers of children with atopic dermatitis and with a rare inflammatory condition, and with spouses caring for a partner with serious mental illness, capture the people who manage medication, spot deterioration and hold the thread between appointments. Their fatigue is a safety issue.
What does this pattern mean for NCD safety research?
Three things stand out. Safety research needs to run over time, not stop at a single sitting. It works better on video than it does on paper. And it needs to ask about things no incident report would ever capture.
Risk lives in the routine, so the research has to be longitudinal
The heart failure and kidney injury studies work because they run for weeks and months, not because they ask better questions. A single interview asks someone to summarise six months of self-management from memory. A diary catches the week the routine broke.
Show, do not tell
The strongest safety signals in these studies are visual: where the inhaler actually lives, what the pill organiser actually looks like on a bad week, whether the emergency medication is genuinely in the bag. Participants are not withholding this information in interviews. They simply do not think to mention it.
Patients notice safety problems that systems do not log
Across these studies, participants repeatedly describe confusion at handover, contradictory advice, appointments that were never followed up and symptoms they did not know were worth reporting. None of that appears in an incident report, because no incident was recorded. It appears in a video diary because someone was asked what their Tuesday was like.
What does "safe care for life" mean in practice?
It means treating patients living with NCDs as partners who help spot risk, not just people who receive care. It means building research to match. That's exactly the brief WHO set for 2026.
WHO's working group on this year's campaign made a point of describing people living with NCDs as partners rather than patients, and of positioning safe care as something that belongs to everyday life rather than only to clinical settings. That is a research brief as much as a communications one.
If you are planning work around NCD care, prevention, adherence or health system experience, the methods are already proven. The question is whether patient safety is written into the discussion guide.
That's where we can help. Indeemo's Catalyst team works with healthcare and pharma teams to design studies exactly this way: longitudinal, visual, and built around the questions patients actually raise, whether you're running the fieldwork yourself or want us to lend a hand with study design, recruitment, or analysis. If you're planning research for World Patient Safety Day or the wider NCD agenda, get closer to what your patients are already trying to tell you. Learn more about how Indeemo works, or talk to our team.
Frequently asked questions
What is World Patient Safety Day 2026 about?
World Patient Safety Day is a WHO campaign held every year on 17 September. The 2026 theme, the seventh year of the campaign, is "Safe care for noncommunicable diseases," with the slogan "Safe care for life!" It focuses on reducing preventable harm for people living with long-term conditions like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular and respiratory disease.
Why are noncommunicable diseases a patient safety concern?
NCDs account for roughly three quarters of deaths worldwide, and people living with them interact with the health system repeatedly over years rather than once. That repeated, mostly unsupervised contact, across clinics, pharmacies and home, creates more opportunities for things to go wrong at any single point.
How does qualitative research help identify patient safety risks?
Much of the risk in NCD care happens between appointments: missed doses, storage mistakes, confusion after a handover. Mobile diary studies and ethnography capture what happens in that gap, in the patient's own words and on video, rather than relying on what they remember to report weeks later.
Why does patient safety research need to be longitudinal?
A single interview asks someone to summarise months of self-management from memory, which tends to smooth over the exact moments where safety breaks down. Diary studies that run over weeks or months catch the week the routine actually broke.
Can Indeemo help with NCD-focused patient safety research?
Yes. You can run studies independently on the platform, or partner with Indeemo's Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, or the full project, whether you're a healthcare provider, a pharma team, or a public health organisation.
