The patient died: What about involvement in the investigation process? (May 2020)

Summary

Patient and family involvement is high on the international quality and safety agenda. This paper, published in the International Journal for Quality in Health Care, considers possible ways of involving families in investigations of fatal adverse events and how their greater participation might improve the quality of investigations.

There is limited guidance and research on how to constitute effective involvement. There is a need for co-designing the investigation process, explicitly agreeing the family’s level of involvement, supporting and preparing the family, providing easily accessible user-friendly language and using different methods of involvement (e.g. individual interviews, focus group interviews and questionnaires), depending on the family’s needs.