National Patient Safety Consortium: Learning from Large-Scale Collaboration.

From 2014 to 2018, the Canadian Patient Safety Institute brought together key partners and established the National Patient Safety Consortium to drive a shared action plan for safer healthcare. With ongoing consensus development on key priorities, an unprecedented level of collaboration and shared leadership with diverse stakeholders and patients and families as full partners, the Consortium and its Integrated Patient Safety Action Plan built a culture of engagement and improvement across Canada.

Patient Engagement in a Large-Scale Change Initiative: "As Safe as Possible, as Soon as Possible".

Patients for Patient Safety Canada (PFPSC) member engagement has evolved from individual stories to having 27 patients and family members actively participating in the National Patient Safety Consortium. PFPSC collaborated with 270 other stakeholders in governance, leadership and action teams to design, implement and evaluate the National Patient Safety Consortium and Integrated Patient Safety Action Plan. There were several key outputs, including a patient engagement guide. This article illustrates how patients were meaningfully engaged in a large-scale change initiative, highlighting the experiences of the patient partners and organizational partners in this transformational change.

Patient Safety Never Events: Cross-Canada Checkup.

In September 2015, Health Quality Ontario (HQO) and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), with an action team that brought together quality councils and committees along with patient and family representatives, garnered consensus and published the report Never Events for Hospital Care in Canada (HQO and CPSI 2015). The report is a call to action for healthcare leaders to prevent the occurrence of never events. Many sites have already been collecting data and focusing efforts on reducing never events. We need to take this action further, to collaborate between sites and provinces and territories so that we can learn from one another and prevent patient harm. This is an opportune time to centre our efforts so that never events no longer occur in our hospitals.

Using an Integrated Knowledge Translation (IKT) Approach to Enable Policy Change for Electronic Consultations in Canada.

This paper explores our efforts to support the expansion of a regional electronic consultation (eConsult) service on a national level by addressing potential policy barriers. We used an integrated knowledge translation (IKT) strategy based on five key activities leading to a National eConsult Policy Think Tank meeting: (1) identifying potential policy enablers and barriers; (2) engaging national and provincial/territorial partners; (3) including patient voices; (4) undertaking co-design and planning; and (5) adopting a solution-based approach. We successfully leveraged a diverse set of stakeholders in strategic discussions, culminating in actionable suggestions for next steps, which will serve to inform a national implementation strategy.

New Tools for Measuring and Improving Patient Safety in Canadian Hospitals.

The Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) have collaborated on a new measure of patient safety, along with a resource of evidence-informed practices. This measure captures four broad categories of harm in acute care hospitals, consisting of 31 clinical groups selected by clinicians. Analysis showed that harm was experienced in 1 of 18 hospital stays in Canada in 2014ߝ2015 and that no single category accounted for the majority of harmful events. Although CIHI and CPSI continue to work with hospitals and experts to further refine the methodology, the measure and associated Improvement Resource are useful new tools for monitoring and identifying harm, and have the potential to improve patient safety.