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EventAs part of Care Forward, a national movement focused on making care better for over a million people across the country, Healthcare Excellence Canada with supporting organisations are launching new offerings that provide participants with funding, resources and coaching to drive impact on four key priorities: expanding care access, helping more people age where they call home, advancing person-centred long-term care and strengthening the health workforce. Join this webinar series to explore these offerings and how you can get involved: Right Care Challenge supports health and social care organizations to launch or enhance initiatives that ensure patients receive the right care, at the right time, in the right place—all while helping reduce avoidable emergency department visits. Enhancing Integrated Care supports primary and community care organisations to strengthen integrated team-based care models, including virtual care, making access easier and reducing pressure on emergency departments. Paramedics and Social Prescribing helps paramedic teams use social prescribing to connect clients with local community services, improving overall health and wellbeing. Primary Care Access Improvement helps team-based primary care organisations create efficiencies and optimise team functioning, so patients receive timely care, regardless of urgency or demand. Nursing Home Without Walls supports jurisdictions across the country to bring nursing home support and services to older adults in their own homes, helping them age safely and comfortably where they already live. Sparking Change in Appropriate Use of Antipsychotics Awards Program provides long-term care homes across Canada with support to use person-centered approaches to reduce potentially inappropriate antipsychotic use. Register
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Content ArticleHealthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) recognises that purposeful patient engagement is fundamental to transforming the health system and improving the quality and safety of care. Patients, caregivers, and community members offer insights that lead to better, more sustainable improvements in healthcare and health systems. The Patient Safety, Equity and Engagement team at HEC supports individuals working within the health system, including patient partners, healthcare teams and HEC staff, to meaningfully engage patients, caregivers and communities in healthcare transformation. Find out more about HEC's approach.
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Content ArticleNew Hospital Harm data shows that 1 in every 17 hospital stays in Canada involved patient harm in 2023-2024, highlighting the ongoing need to make healthcare safer for everyone. Reported by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), the rate of hospital harm has held steady at 6% for the past four years after increasing in 2020. In this article, Denise McCuaig, Executive Director for Healthcare Transformation & Capacity Building at Healthcare Excellence Canada looks at how effective communication and engaging patients and their caregivers can improve the safety and quality of healthcare. She outlines four ways to prioritise safety through patient engagement: Create an engaging environment. Engagement-capable environments value the wisdom and experiences of patients and their essential care partners, fostering a culture of patient- and family-centred care that helps improve quality, safety and equitable outcomes. Foster inclusive communication. Inclusive communication is a key skill for healthcare providers, helping reduce misunderstandings, bridge communication gaps and make all patients feel valued. Recognise different forms of harm. Safety extends beyond the physical; psychological, social and spiritual wellbeing are also important. Engaging diverse individuals with lived experiences and providing trauma-informed care can help reduce harm, no matter what form. Learn to prevent harm. Taking a proactive approach to patient safety enables healthcare providers to prevent harm before it happens. Understanding how safety incidents affect patients, caregivers and healthcare teams can lead to better safety outcomes.
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Content ArticleThis one-page guide outlines six ways health systems in Canada can improve to better support and retain the health workforce. Based on evidence and feedback from health leaders nationwide, it describes six strategies that can help make health systems more supportive and sustainable for those who work in them: Fostering physically safe work environments. Enhancing sustainable staffing. Building flexible work structures. Provide equitable and appropriate compensation. Ensuring supportive and inclusive workplaces. Supporting career advancement. Although produced by Healthcare Excellence Canada, it is relevant to health systems globally.
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EventuntilHealth professionals are regularly confronted with emotional events in the delivery of care. While some of these events induce extreme emotional states such as stress, most are associated with milder states such as frustration at a perceived lack of professionalism, sadness at an undesired patient prognosis, or happiness following a positive clinical encounter. Current research in neuroscience and cognitive sciences indicates that emotions modulate a variety of cognitive processes, including perception, memory, attention, and reasoning. As such, emotion-evoking situations likely affect what information health professionals attend to, what they remember, as well as the way in which they make decisions in practice. The purpose of this presentation is to present an overview of the literature on emotions and performance, and discuss the implications for patient care. Further information in the attached pdf. Seminar_Abstract+bio_5.12.24.V.L.docx
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News ArticleA Canadian teen is hospitalised in critical condition with what is believed to be bird flu, a British Columbia health official said Tuesday. It’s not clear how the teenager picked up the virus, which has been detected recently in wild birds and poultry in the province, said Dr Bonnie Henry, British Columbia's health officer. The teen is not known to have any contact with infected animals, she said. Officials have released few details about the patient. Henry said the teen was healthy before developing symptoms more than a week ago – initially eye redness, cough and fever – and has been hospitalised with a respiratory illness since Friday in Vancouver. Initial testing indicated the infection is from bird flu. Officials believe it is the Type A H5N1 bird flu but are awaiting confirmation. H5N1 has been spreading widely in the US among wild birds, poultry, cows and a number of other animals. This year, 46 people in the US – mostly farmworkers – have tested positive with mostly mild symptoms. In Canada, testing has been done on about three dozen people who were in contact with the teen. None of them have evidence of infection, Henry said. Read full story Source: The Independent, 13 November 2024
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News ArticleA disease that is more commonly associated with the trenches of the First World War, and can sometimes be found in refugee camps, has been detected in several patients in Alberta who received organ transplants. Bartonella quintana, an infection caused by body lice, has been found in seven organ transplant recipients in Alberta since 2022, according to Dr. Dima Kabbani, a transplant infectious disease physician who treated the patients. "It was quite alarming to us, especially that we know that this bacteria can cause a more serious type of infection because sometimes it can affect your heart valve or it can affect some of the major organs," Kabbani said. "We were surprised to see that type of infection in Alberta." The disease, which presents as skin lesions, was transferred to organ recipients from their deceased donors, all of whom were people who had been living with homelessness and who had been infected themselves. "It signals that the bacteria is actually around individuals who are unhoused. So it tells you about a bigger public health problem," Kabbani said. "If these individuals had access to just water to wash their clothes, or to shower, then we should not have been seeing this type of infection in people who are unhoused in Alberta." Read full story Source: CBC, 26 October 2024
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Content ArticlePatient safety provides an important foundation for high-quality care. Research in Canada and elsewhere has identified substantial levels of harm in hospitals and other settings; these results spurred the development and spread of safety practices, along with strategies to strengthen organizational training, incident reporting and analysis and a host of resources intended to reduce the burden of harm. Yet, despite these efforts, 20 years after the publication of the Canadian Adverse Event study and other studies, many leaders believe progress in patient safety has stalled. Human resource issues dominate current strategic plans, but these issues need to be linked to renewed efforts to assure safer care.
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Content ArticleThis analysis is based on 446 qualitative responses to one target question: “Do you think the lived experience you bring to your patient partner role makes you an expert? Please explain in the box below”. Through a discursive analysis of the comments, the authors explored the meanings ascribed to concepts of expert, expertise, and experience. Ultimately, they found nuanced and sometimes contradictory understandings. Thus, dilemmas of expertise in the patient engagement field may not be entirely about claims to specialised knowledge. Instead, discourses seem to be mobilised in response to the thorny, political question: “who is authorised to speak on behalf of patients”? To meaningfully advance the conversation within patient engagement research and practice, the authors argue for more sociological and political understandings of forms of expertise, objects of expertise, and deployments of expert status in different kinds of knowledge spaces.
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Content ArticleHealthcare Excellence Canada 2023-24 impact report highlights how they have supported people from across the country to deliver measurable impact in diverse care settings across the country—working with hundreds of individuals and organisations to deliver programmes involving 1,087 teams that serve more than 920,000 patients and residents each year. Learn more about how Healthcare Excellence Canada (HEC) works to spread innovation, strengthen capabilities and catalyse policy change to support large-scale system improvement, from supporting the healthcare workforce to improving access to healthcare to fostering cultural safety.
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EventuntilJoin the conversation as our panelists discuss healthcare harm and safety from multiple perspectives and across multiple settings. Registration is now open — sign up for as many as you like! The webinars in this series include: Expanding perspectives: Understanding and reducing healthcare harm First Nations, Inuit and Métis experiences with racism in healthcare systems Let’s talk about safer care in the community Courageous leadership: Enabling safer healthcare environments Register
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Content ArticleNear misses are incidents that could have led to harm but were detected and addressed before reaching the patient. Learning from these incidents reveals processes that help in detecting errors and also illuminates opportunities for continuous quality improvement. At present, limited Canadian data are available concerning interventions by community pharmacy teams to correct errors before they reach the patient (also known as “good catches”). The multi-incident analysis reported here highlights practices and processes that resulted in successful interception of errors in the community pharmacy setting.
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Event
Getting ready for CPSW: Moving to action
Patient Safety Learning posted an event in Community Calendar
Recognising and reducing healthcare harm matters to those receiving and delivering care. In this session, participants will explore how to broaden their understanding of healthcare harm through the use of an activity card with their teams to stimulate reflection and action, together. They will also hear the experiences of healthcare leaders who have facilitated the activity with their teams and what they learned. Following the formal discussion, participants will have an opportunity to ask questions and share information and insights in a coach’s corner about planning activities and participating in Canadian Patient Safety Week. Register -
Content ArticleIn this blog, Sling the Mesh founder Kath Sansom highlights the variation in medical treatment depending on where you live in the world. Describing patient safety advocacy as "like a giant game of chess—but a hideous version where innocent people get hurt," she describes recent developments in the use of pelvic mesh globally. New Zealand recently suspended the use of a particular type of pelvic mesh at the same time as a Canadian study recommended its use for stress urinary incontinence (SUI). Kath gives a brief history of mesh sling suspension and argues that patient safety needs joined up thinking to protect women around the world.
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Content ArticleThe Strengthening Medication Safety in Long-Term Care initiative, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care was established in partnership with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) Canada to address the medication safety-related recommendations in Justice Gillese’s Long-Term Care Homes Public Inquiry Report. The three-year initiative is designed to improve medication management processes, including those intended to deter and detect intentional and unintentional harm in long-term care homes across the province of Ontario. This bulletin provides an overview of the initiative and highlights selected examples of improvement projects completed in the first phase.
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Content ArticleThis bulletin from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) describes two new in-hospital infections indicators for Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) and Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). It includes a table listing CIHI’s selected patient safety performance indicators and definitions.
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Content ArticleHistorically, patient safety efforts have focused mostly on measuring and responding to harm. However, safety is much more than the absence of harm. Instead, patient safety includes looking at the whole system: its past, present and future in all its complexity. Healthcare Excellence Canada and Patients for Patient Safety Canada held many conversations with users of the health system, people who work in healthcare and safety scientists. The ideas collected suggest a new way of approaching patient safety – where everyone can contribute to creating safe conditions and where harm is more than physical. This discussion guide summarises what has been learned so far and captured in this key statement: Everyone contributes to patient safety. Together we must learn and act to create safer care and reduce all forms of healthcare harm.
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Content ArticleIf you are throwing up, having diarrhoea, drinking less water and/or have a fever, you can become dehydrated. Being dehydrated means your body doesn't have enough fluids. When you're dehydrated, some medications used to treat certain health problems may cause unwanted side effects, such as harm to your kidneys. It is important to have a plan to prevent these side effects in case you should become sick and dehydrated. The authors of this guidance learned about a person who died in hospital as a result of side effects of taking a particular medication while dehydrated. They were taking a diabetes medication called empagliflozin and kept taking the same dose after becoming sick. This medication is helpful for people with diabetes, but it can cause serious side effects if it's taken when the person is dehydrated. This guidance offers advice on how to reduce the risk of side effects from your medications when you are sick and dehydrated.
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Content ArticleSocial movement action for knowledge uptake and sustainability can be defined as individuals, groups, or organisations that, as voluntary and intrinsically motivated change agents, mobilise around a common cause to improve outcomes through knowledge uptake and sustainability. This article in the International Journal of Nursing Sciences shares a concept analysis of social movement aimed at advancing its application to evidence uptake and sustainability in healthcare. The authors concluded that social movement action can provide a lens through which to view implementation science. Collective action and collective identity–concepts less frequently canvassed in implementation science literature–can lend insight into grassroots approaches to uptake and sustainability. The concept analysis resulted in the development of the Social Movement Action Framework.
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Content ArticleThe Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS) released its report on health human resources (HHR) in Canada. The report provides key findings designed to inform stakeholders (including governments). The report provides evidence-informed approaches to addressing the current challenges facing the Canadian health workforce. The three overarching themes were identified: support and retention deployment and service delivery planning and development.
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Content ArticleThe Learning Together Evaluation framework for Patient and Public Engagement (PPE) in research is an adaptable tool which can be used to plan and to evaluate patient engagement before, during and at the end of a project. The Learning Together Framework can be used in multiple ways with the purpose of mutual learning and understanding by all partners. It is rooted in seven guiding principles of patient engagement defined by the patient-oriented research community: Relationship building Co-building Equity, diversity and inclusion Support and barrier removal Transparency Sustainability Transformation
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EventuntilThis virtual workshop will provide paramedics with background theory and hands-on practice in incident analysis using Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and in proactive risk assessment using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Register
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EventuntilThis virtual workshop will provide paramedics with background theory and hands-on practice in incident analysis using Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and in proactive risk assessment using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Register
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EventuntilThis virtual workshop will provide participants with background theory and hands-on practice in using a multi-incident analysis to analyse a group of medication incidents that share a common topic on day 1 and introduce a novel tool called the Medication Safety Culture Indicator Matrix (MedSCIM) on day 2. Register
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EventuntilThis virtual workshop will provide participants with background theory and hands-on practice in using a multi-incident analysis to analyse a group of medication incidents that share a common topic on day 1 and introduce a novel tool called the Medication Safety Culture Indicator Matrix (MedSCIM) on day 2. Register
