The World Patient Safety Congress Europe takes place at the Amsterdam RAI from 22 to 24 September 2026, opening with pre-congress workshops on the Tuesday afternoon and running two full main-congress days on the Wednesday and Thursday. Framed around risk management, AI and automation, and safety vigilance, it is Europe's largest gathering where drug-safety strategy meets the technology now reshaping how safety signals are detected and acted on.
The congress draws more than 1,800 attendees, over 250 speakers and 100-plus exhibitors across ten parallel tracks: keynote, artificial intelligence, automation, compliance, digital transformation, outsourcing, patient centricity, quality assurance, risk management and signal detection and management. The audience is deliberately cross-functional — C-suite, R&D and data leaders alongside pharmacovigilance operations teams — and the product scope runs wider than most PV meetings, covering pharmaceuticals, animal health, over-the-counter medicines, cosmetics and dietary supplements.
Programme highlights include pre-congress workshops on advancing pharmacovigilance in animal health, led by Karen van der Velden (Head, Global Pharmacovigilance Operations, Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica), Gillian Diesel (Head of UK/IE Affiliate Regulatory and Pharmacovigilance, Elanco Animal Health) and Blanca Berrocal Gonzalez (Head of Pharmacovigilance Compliance and International Engagement). Main-stage content examines the human-machine partnership and how to upskill the PV workforce for an automated future, digital additional risk minimisation measures with inspection-ready implementation, REMS transitions drawn from real-world experience, evidence-backed safety document distribution across sites, ethics committees and business partners, and risk-based oversight that calibrates audit frequency to product risk tier. A widely discussed panel explores the "shift-left" model, where early estimates suggest 60 to 70 per cent of case processing could pass through automatically, concentrating the remaining 30 per cent on judgment-driven expert review — and what that means for service providers, business models and the wider vigilance landscape over the coming years.
Speakers come from Pfizer, CSL, Boehringer Ingelheim, Elanco and a broad set of technology and consulting partners, with case studies on regulatory reporting configuration and case follow-up automation that have measurably reduced manual effort while improving the reporter experience.
For Gulf-based quality, patient safety and pharmacovigilance professionals, the value here is less about credit hours and more about seeing how European marketing authorisation holders are operationalising AI in safety workflows under regulatory scrutiny — practical detail that transfers directly to SFDA-regulated environments and to hospital quality departments building their own incident and signal processes. Delegate tickets are sold through the organiser's secure booking portal, and an event app is published for agenda planning and networking ahead of the congress.
