The International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare focuses excellent, safe and affordable healthcare. As a hospital pharmacist with a special interest in medication safety, I attended the 2012 forum in Paris, 17–20 April, and I would like to share some of the current developments in patient safety that were discussed.

Since the report ‘To err is human’ was published more than a decade ago, improving patient safety has become a major goal in healthcare.1 We now have more insight into the prevalence and causes of errors and many programmes and interventions have been designed to reduce errors and subsequent adverse events. However, despite our concerted efforts as hospital pharmacists to do our best for our patients, many of us still feel we have to double check as many things as we can when our own relatives are admitted to the hospital. In line with this feeling, several initiatives …