Improving the safety of vaccine delivery

Vaccines save millions of lives per annum as an integral part of community primary care provision worldwide. Adverse events due to the vaccine delivery process outnumber those arising from the pharmacological properties of the vaccines themselves. Whilst one in three patients receiving a vaccine will encounter some form of error, little is known about their underlying causes and how to mitigate them in practice. Patient safety incident reporting systems and adverse drug event surveillance offer a rich opportunity for understanding the underlying causes of those errors. Reducing harm relies on the identification and implementation of changes to improve vaccine safety at multiple levels: from patient interventions through to organizational actions at local, national and international levels. Here we highlight the potential for maximizing learning from patient safety incident reports to improve the quality and safety of vaccine delivery.