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Patient safety

Dear patient, your safety is our top priority!

One of the guiding principles of Viljandi Hospital’s care is “safety and quality” and our promise is “to provide a sense of security”. This means that the safety and sense of security of our clients/patients and their loved ones, as well as of our staff, is our top priority.

Viljandi Hospital’s goal is to provide safe and high quality services to patients and clients, and all hospital staff must be involved and contribute to this goal.



Patient safety is the purposeful and consistent reduction of the risks to patients associated with the provision of health care and the mitigation of the effects of harm when it occurs. Identifying, reporting, learning from, preventing and improving patient safety events is one of the most important measures to improve the quality of care. To this end, we have implemented a safety incident reporting system at Villjandi Hospital, with the main objective of identifying risks and adverse events related to the provision of health care services, preventing potential future errors and learning from mistakes, all with the aim of ensuring the safest possible care environment and the safest possible services.

Patient safety incident (hereinafter referred to as a safety incident) is a situation related to the provision of healthcare that could have potentially caused or actually caused harm to a patient that could have been avoided.

If we are to be prepared to report safety incidents in the first place, we need to develop a non-blaming and non-punitive organisational culture in the hospital. This means being open to feedback and discussion, focusing incident discussions on identifying the cause of the incident rather than blaming, conducting incident discussions without damaging the working atmosphere and colleagues, and being willing to learn and make changes to our own and our department’s practices.

The experiences and feedback of patients and their relatives are also very important in raising the level of patient safety. As a long-standing measure, we have implemented a Suggestions and Complaints Mechanism at the hospital to analyse and improve the way our hospital operates based on patient feedback, thereby improving the quality of services and patient satisfaction with our hospital. As a new measure, we would like to involve patients and their relatives in the process of reporting safety incidents. However, information and awareness-raising among patients on this issue is essential.

Patient safety incidents are divided into:

  1. Occasional incidents: healthcare-related situations that did not reach the patient but could have caused harm to the patient if not intervened in time.
  2. No harm incidents: A situation related to the provision of health care that reached the patient but did not result in harm.
  3. Harmful incidents: a situation related to the provision of health care which resulted in harm to the patient. Complications of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures are also considered as adverse events.

There are also many ways in which the patient can contribute to his or her treatment and recovery in hospital:

  1. First of all, it is important to provide health professionals with timely and accurate information about your health;
  2. Secondly, to work well with your healthcare team to get better, including trying to be active in making decisions about your health.
  3. Third is to spot risks or treatment side effects (safety events) and report them to hospital staff.

There are several ways to report safety incidents at Viljandi Hospital. For example, you can immediately report a safety incident to your doctor or another health care professional with whom the patient has direct contact and whom the patient trusts. Alternatively, the incident can be reported to the hospital’s e-mail address viljandihaigla@viljandihaigla.ee. 

In case the description of the incident contains sensitive information (specific health data), please send the description of the safety incident by e-mail in encrypted form to ensure the confidentiality of personal data. We kindly ask you to encrypt the document in the name of Viljandi Hospital SA and send it by e-mail to viljandihaigla@viljandihaigla.ee.

When reporting an accident, it is important to provide information on the following:

  • If this happened to me or to someone else in the hospital: it would be a good idea to include the name or personal identification number of the person, if known. This will enable the hospital to investigate the specific case more thoroughly.
  • Where the incident occurred.
  • Where the incident took place: the location should be described as precisely as possible, either by department, floor or at least by ward.
  • Exactly what happened: describe in your own words what happened, why it might have happened, what the consequences were, whether you think the incident could have been prevented. If the incident did not have any consequences but could have, this is also important information.
  • If you would like to receive feedback on the resolution of the case, please include your e-mail address.

In addition to feedback from patients, we also expect feedback from the hospital’s partners, i.e. other health care providers – general practitioners, partner hospitals, nursing homes, etc. – about possible safety incidents at Viljandi Hospital. As patients often move between different health care providers, we are always happy to be informed when our actions or inactions have caused or could have caused harm to a patient.