Why the best thinking on patient safety comes from outside healthcare

World Patient Safety Day Speakers

The 2026 theme, Safe Care for Noncommunicable Diseases, sharpens that question further. NCDs now account for the majority of chronic care, which means safety failures play out over years of ongoing treatment, not single procedures.

Healthcare has spent years building safety frameworks, incident reporting systems, and "just culture" policies. But some of the clearest thinking on how to get people to speak up under pressure, and how to design systems that survive human error rather than punish it, comes from industries that had to solve the problem faster and more publicly than medicine did.

Safety at the sharp end of extreme environments

Dr Kevin Fong OBE spent his career moving between two worlds that both treat error as fatal: emergency anaesthesia and space medicine. He trained at NASA's Johnson and Kennedy Space Centres, founded UCL's Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Physiology, and has advised NASA and the European Space Agency on the physiological limits of long-duration missions. His talks on decision-making under pressure draw directly on Apollo-era crisis response, where entire mission protocols were rebuilt around the assumption that operators would eventually make mistakes, and the job of the system was to catch them before they became catastrophic.

Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton built an academic career out of exactly this question. One of the most senior female fire officers in the world, she led the fire service response to the London Bridge attack, the Finsbury Park attack, and the aftermath of Grenfell, while completing a PhD in behavioural neuroscience on how firefighters make life-or-death decisions with incomplete information. Her book, The Heat of the Moment, sets out the decision-making models she developed from that research, now used to train crews on how bias and instinct distort judgement under pressure, which is the same failure point behind most clinical error.

Helen Sharman offers a different vantage point on the same discipline. As the first British astronaut, she went through eighteen months of training in Russia that covered every conceivable emergency scenario before she was allowed near a Soyuz capsule. Her account of that preparation, and of operating as part of a small, high-stakes crew where every person's judgment affects everyone else's survival, translates directly to any team working in conditions where the margin for error is thin.

Brothers Dr Xand van Tulleken and Dr Chris van Tulleken bring the clinical side of this. Xand worked as a junior doctor during the Darfur conflict and lectures in tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine; Chris is an infectious diseases doctor at UCLH and a New York Times bestselling author. Both have spent years communicating complex, high-stakes medical decisions to public audiences, which is its own kind of safety skill: making sure people understand risk well enough to act on it correctly.

What failure actually costs

Jason Anker MBE gives this subject its most direct account. In 1993, a construction site accident left him paralysed from the waist down at 24. His talks trace what happened before the fall, the accident itself, the addiction and family breakdown that followed, and the two decades since spent rebuilding his life and turning his experience into safety advocacy through Proud2bSafe. He's delivered the story more than 3,000 times, to audiences ranging from site directors to frontline crews, because a near miss is easy to file away and a life sentence is not.

Jason co-founded his safety consultancy, Anker & Marsh, with Professor Tim Marsh, a chartered psychologist who has spent over 25 years studying why organisations fail to report problems until it's too late. Tim's research background is in behavioural safety in construction, and his client list already includes the World Health Organisation and the European Space Agency, which puts him in a rare position: someone who has worked directly across the exact industries this piece is drawing together.

Leading the culture change

Andy Roe, former Commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, took on a service that Ofsted-equivalent inspectors had placed in special measures and turned it into one of the best-performing fire brigades in the country within five years. His work involved confronting entrenched institutional culture head-on, including racism and misogyny that had gone unaddressed for years, while simultaneously rebuilding the operational systems that keep firefighters and the public safe. Andy now chairs the Building Safety Regulator. His talks are less about fire and more about what it actually takes to change a culture that has learned to protect itself instead of the people it serves, which is precisely the challenge behind the "no shame or blame" culture healthcare is trying to build.

The common thread

None of these speakers work in hospitals, but all of them have spent their careers inside the same problem healthcare is trying to solve: how to get people to report what's going wrong before it becomes a tragedy, and how to build systems that expect human error instead of punishing it after the fact. Space medicine, tropical medicine, construction, and frontline fire response all reached this insight under public scrutiny and severe time pressure, which is exactly why their thinking travels so well into a healthcare setting.

For an event built around patient safety, psychological safety, or high-pressure team culture, that outside perspective tends to land harder than another internal case study. It gives the room permission to see their own challenge as part of a bigger, well-studied pattern, rather than a problem unique to their ward or their organisation.

💡 Would you like to mark World Patient Safety Day with an expert speaker? Let us know, and we'll find the perfect PepTalk expert for your organisation. Email us at bookings@getapeptalk.com or send us a message via the chat. You can also call us on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US). Remember, it's always a good time to get a PepTalk!