Health worker safety as an essential condition for patient safety

The greatest asset of any health system is its professionals, and they must be cared for in order to take care. It is necessary to emphasize that they are key for the resilience of our health systems. This is particularly important in crisis times and especially important for primary health care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, working conditions have been the main common latent factor for patient safety incidents. Primary Care professionals have worked in unsafe working conditions, with lack of means of protection, great uncertainty, lack of scientific knowledge and rapidly changing work protocols for dealing with cases and contacts of COVID-19 infection, with a high care pressure, long working hours, suspension of vacations, and even changes in their jobs. All of this has contributed to their becoming, not only the first victims of the pandemic, but also the second victims of the adverse events that occurred during it. Therefore, in this article we analyze the main risks and damages suffered by professionals in Primary Care and provide keys to contribute to their protection in future similar situations. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L.U. This is an open access article underthe CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).