Guest editorial Patient safety and quality in healthcare: Nursing ethics for

Globally, health systems face constraints and challenges around patient safety and quality, lack of human resources, and rising moral distress among nurses. This concern about the gap in quality and patient safety and the need for improvement was highlighted more than a decade ago in two landmark studies by the Institute of Medicine (IOM): To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. These reports were followed by a staggering number of scholarly publications, improvement initiatives, and the establishment of various institutions on patient safety.1 In 2004, the World Alliance for Patient Safety was launched to advance the goal of patient safety, to coordinate patient safety initiatives globally, and to reduce the impact of unsafe healthcare through a number of systemic programs (e.g. mobilizing patients and organizations for patient safety, addressing taxonomy, research, development, and reporting of learning systems).2,3 Additionally, an ad hoc expert group of the Alliance produced a report summarizing the evidence on patient safety, which highlighted structural, process, and outcome gaps in need of further research (e.g. safety culture, organizational deter-minants, structural accountability, lack of patient involvement in patient safety, adverse events, injuries related to drug treatment, and medical devices).2 Furthermore, the report highlighted the burden in terms of morbidity and mortality posed by unsafe healthcare globally, lack of available data from developin