HIROC Conference 2024: Stories from Our Subscriber Partnerships

“Driving safety action through identifying and prioritizing risk with the wide variety of existing HIROC tools and sharing learnings from past Safety Grants winners and Applied Safety Projects helps our healthcare systems explore uncertainty, prioritize risk, and, ultimately, improve patient safety and experience.” – Trevor Hall, HIROC VP, Healthcare Safety and Risk Management.

In part two of our series from HIROC’s 2024 Annual Conference we highlight the important safety initiatives of our Subscribers. These initiatives were made possible with the support of HIROC, including HIROC’s Safety Grants Program and Applied Safety Program.

Safety Grants Program

Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) Health Services’ Central Zone shared learnings from their suicide prevention project. Suicide is a significant cause of premature death in Canada. It affects people of all ages and backgrounds across all Canadian regions. According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, an average of more than ten Canadians died by suicide each day in 2012.

HIROC’s Safety Grants Program supported the NL Health Services’ Central Zone team to lead a project aiming to prevent suicide and attempted suicide across the care continuum through improved training in suicide risk assessment and tools. Joanne Pelley, VP, Chief Nursing Information Officer (interim)/Provincial Chief Nursing Officer; and Mimie Carroll, Regional Director, Mental Health and Addictions Services, spoke about their project’s significance as NL has the fourth highest suicide rate of all Canadian provinces and territories.

NL Health Services’ Central Zone had five goals with their project:

• Meet Accreditation Canada’s Required Organizational Practice for clients to be assessed and monitored for their suicide risk
• Create suicide mitigation strategy and integrate it within Central Zone
• Standardize policy and procedure across all mental health and addictions programs, long-term care, and emergency departments
• Standardize education
• Enhance Emergency Suicide Intervention Kits

“We want to thank HIROC’s Safety Grants Program. This grant helped to support our innovative safety work on suicide prevention. We would like to share how we utilized the grant to enhance suicide prevention kits and spread them to all sites across our organization and to deliver education and training.” – Joanne Pelley

To create their suicide mitigation strategy, they formed a working group with key stakeholders; did jurisdictional scans of regional, provincial, and national suicide risk policies and best practices; and completed comparative analyses of existing policies across different services and programs and current suicide risk assessment tools used in all program areas.

When standardizing education, they adopted a blended model of education delivery, an updated electronic learning system, a Suicide Risk Assessment Inventory, and included training on their Emergency Suicide Intervention Kits.

Enhancing the Emergency Suicide Intervention Kits was a priority as they had originally been rolled out in 2018 only to emergency and mental health and addictions sites. As part of this Safety Grants Program, they scaled up the roll-out to include all case management vehicles, long-term care sites, and acute care sites.

Learn more about HIROC’s Safety Grants Program here.

Applied Safety Program

“Having HIROC as a partner in quality and safe care improvements resulted in greater interprofessional engagement and contentment in relationships,” said Audra Jesso, Manager, Maternal Newborn Program. Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) in Barrie, ON, worked with HIROC through our Applied Safety Program to reduce wait times in their Obstetrical Triage Unit. Jesso spoke about the success of the partnership and program and her team’s eagerness to work with HIROC’s Human Factors Engineers again.

The goal of this project was to optimize safety in RVH’s Obstetrical Triage Unit. To do this, HIROC worked with them to analyze their overall system to identify key areas of focus including patient flow, team flow, and to establish recommendations for overall system improvements. The project aimed to reduce the wait time from patient registration to beginning labour induction by 50%.

The project was an overwhelming success with the following early results:

• Reduced length of stay in triage by 57%
• Reduced time from patient registration to doctor assessment by 47%
• 89% of patients received first choice of induction date
• 85% of satisfaction surveys showed 100% satisfaction
• Improved team engagement and collaboration

The RVH team was very happy with these results and can’t wait to work with HIROC’s Human Factors Engineers again.

“The integration of the HIROC team at RVH is an excellent example of partnership. The HIROC team members supported our Birthing Unit team in establishing clear objectives and expectations for our project. They listened and asked key questions that created a climate that was mutually respectful and became a trusting partnership.” – Audra Jesso

If you are interested in learning more about HIROC’s Applied Safety Program, please email Carleene Bañez, Senior Healthcare Risk Management Specialist, at [email protected].

Thank you to our Subscribers who spoke at and attended the conference! Hearing your stories and experiences made for a day full of great insights and knowledge-sharing, bringing us one step closer to turning the corner on patient safety. 

Stay tuned for our final article from the conference!

This article is part of a 3-part series; check out the other two Conference recaps:
HIROC Conference 2024: Turning Tragedy into Advocacy, Becoming a Better Leader, & Reinforcing Resiliency
HIROC Conference 2024: Enabling Safe AI Adoption In Healthcare

By Gillian Brandon-Hart, Communications and Marketing Specialist, HIROC