Globally, World Patient Safety Day (WPSD) is celebrated on 17 September to raise awareness on healthcare safety and quality. This initiative by the World Health Organisation (WHO) inspires healthcare professionals to show their commitment to patient safety.

The theme for 2025 is “Safe care for every newborn and every child”, emphasising that each child has the right to safe and quality care from birth.

Dr Sabelile Tenza, a patient safety expert at the Quality in Nursing and Midwifery (NuMIQ) research entity at the North-West University (NWU), shares some insights which could help healthcare leaders in paediatric wards

“Pediatric wards are among the areas that require extra caution when delivering health services because errors can occur quickly due to the fast-paced nature of service delivery,” she says. “Children have special needs, and planning their treatment requires lots of calculation, making it easy to incur common medical errors such as wrong medication, wrong dose, wrong route and wrong frequency.”

Drawing on her own experience of paediatric units in South African hospitals, Dr Tenza comments on what good and poor practices.

“Hospitals where unit leaders prioritise teamwork, support their staff, provide resources and empower their team members have had great results with happy mothers and children. Meanwhile, those with staff shortages, lack of teamwork, poor-quality medical equipment, negative practice environments, poor support for staff and negative attitudes towards mothers of children often lead to more medical errors.”

One common, yet preventable, contributing factor to medical errors and child neglect in hospitals is the shifting of basic nursing duties to mothers.

Mothers are not nurses

“The role of mothers in paediatric wards should be to support the care of their children during hospitalisation to improve child cooperation by serving as a familiar face, creating a conventional environment for the admitted child. However, their presence in paediatric wards has shifted staffing priorities for basic nursing care duties, and normalised expectations that mothers must take care of their children’s basic nursing needs. They end up giving medications and nebulisers.”

She says this practice places mothers in a difficult position as they are often overwhelmed by having a sick child. “The biggest problem here is that the mothers have no one to relieve them; all staff take turns, and they depend on mothers for updates.”

According to Dr Tenza, this situation encourages laziness among some nurses, who fail to conduct thorough check-ups on admitted children and instead rely on updates from mothers.

“It has become common that nurses would focus more on technical machines connected to a child than the patient. Such behaviours have led to compromised patient observation because responsibility has been handed over to the mother,” Dr Tenza adds.

There is an urgent need to encourage parental engagement in child care, with mindfulness that they are not in hospital as part of the hospital workforce.

For mothers staying in hospitals supporting their sick children, Dr Tenza wants you to know that you have the rights to be:

· Treated with respect

· Informed about all processes

· Comforted and emotionally supported

· Asked, not ordered, to assist the hospital in gaining their children’s cooperation and,

· Heard and included in decision-making about their babies.

Dr Tenza is passionate about patient safety and quality in healthcare. She actively empowers teams in hospitals to unite and create positive environments for patients. Earlier this year, she started a monthly webinar with the theme “Let’s talk about patient safety”.

The webinars are intended to support healthcare professionals across the country to learn from experts on issues of quality and safety.

During these webinars, Dr Tenza discusses a vast range of pressing issues. These include preventing litigation in healthcare, dealing with second victim syndrome in response to medical errors, leader support in responding to medical errors, medication errors, surgical care safety practices, and safe maternal care.

Dr Sabelile Tenza is one of the few internationally certified patient safety specialists in the country. She mentors excellent leaders in the Dr Kenneth Kaunda district on quality and safety in healthcare.