Re-explaining patient safety in Intensive Care Medicine: In need of understanding and action

Both patient safety and risk management in the healthcare field have adjusted to a diversity of conceptual models arising from different industries. Nowadays, Patient Safety should not be anchored to the most classical models but should be complemented by innovative advances that allow for a comprehensive view of all the key elements and the participation of the agents involved in this essential dimension of healthcare quality. This narrative review aims to analyze the approaches that have nurtured the science of safety over time and to offer a holistic and integrative vision that allows professionals, patients, and organizations to understand how we can move forward in achieving a risk-free healthcare system or at least, make it safer. Although there are experiences in the healthcare field of the application of the new paradigms of safety, there are still many pending questions to be solved before integrating and applying them in the real world.