Canadian Patient Safety Week is October 24 – 28, 2022. The theme from Healthcare Excellence Canada this year is ‘Press play on Safety Conversations’ which focuses on safer care of older adults through safety conversations and actions.
Healthcare Excellence Canada has provided information and resources to highlight the importance of this year’s Canadian Patient Safety Week theme:
What are safety conversations?
Safety conversations are part of a proactive approach to creating safety as well as responding to and managing harm after it occurs. They are a respectful discussion about safety between two or more people involved in organizing, delivering, seeking, and/or receiving healthcare, including healthcare providers, patients and essential care partners.
Why have safety conversations?
Safety conversations can help you gain more information about the care being discussed and/or provided. Having conversations with patients and essential care partners illuminates how they see, experience and contribute to creating safety. These conversations promote an understanding that staff and patient safety go hand-in-hand and recognize the value of creating safety together. Evidence confirms that organizations with a positive safety culture have less harm, and safety conversations help strengthen this culture.
How to have safety conversations
When we have safety conversations, it changes the way we think about safety. These conversations help us shift away from a focus on past harm to a more holistic view of safety. By moving from assurance and accountability reporting to a ‘practice of inquiry’ that places value on soft intelligence (listening, observing and perceiving), we empower a culture of collective responsibility for safety. The steps outlined below can help you plan and carry-out effective safety conversation.
Step 1: Make it safe to talk safety. Create an environment that allows everyone to say what they think
Step 2: Ask. Safety conversations are built around the practice of asking questions
Step 3: Listen. Listen to and learn from patients and loved ones; acknowledge them as experts in their care
Step 4: Act. Regularly engage with patients, essential care partners and other loved ones as core members of the care team and co-create solutions with them
Step 5: Keep having safety conversations (not just one). Communicate to patients and essential care partners about who to contact if they have concerns or questions
For full details, visit here, or see attached PDF.
