Denis Joseph Bukenya,

The context of understanding and arguing a new paradigm for patient safety in Africa lies within the dominant modes of discourse that have influenced the health and development agenda globally. It harnesses African Partnerships for Patient Safety Community Engagement (ACE) and African Partnerships in Patient Safety (APPS). There is need to build on studies of reverse innovation for the development of strategies to initiate and sustain community engagement in health care delivery systems.

Patient safety perspectives in Africa have become a key focus of the international health communities. Many of the initiatives embrace bidirectional/reverse learning and information flow between low and middle-income countries and high-income countries, with the aim of tackling common unmet needs in patient safety. This paper raises the issue as to whether a community engagement strategy, developed to address patient safety in low and middle-income countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa, can be successfully applied to create and implement strategies to link community-based evidence from the Global South to the Global North through the activation of community knowledge brokers as a conduit to community engagement and innovation production.