UHN Promotes Patient Safety with Poster Campaign

Members of the 9A pilot working group include (clockwise from top left), Laura Pozzobon, Manager, Quality, Safety & Clinical Adoption, UHN; Julie Fox, Senior Planner, Patient Experience, UHN; Kerseri Scane, Manager, Patient Engagement for Health Care Improvement, UHN; Indira Gobin, Nurse Manager, 9A, Toronto Western Hospital. (Photo: UHN)

Canadian Patient Safety Week (CPSW) is October 23-27, 2023, and this year’s theme focuses on small changes that can have a big impact on improving patient safety. To kick it off, we’re highlighting a recent campaign by HIROC Subscriber University Health Network (UHN) that exemplifies this theme.

UHN’s story “Poster campaign aims to empower patients and care partners to raise safety concerns” describes their Escalation of Care Working Group’s campaign to improve patient safety through in-hospital posters geared to patients and their families, which caught our attention. 

Indira Gobin, (L), Nurse Manager on 9A at Toronto Western Hospital, and Ramandip Sidhu, the Charge Nurse on the unit, look at the posters. (Photo: UHN)

HIROC’s vision of partnering to create the safest healthcare system is supported by our goal of sharing knowledge across the sector so lessons learned can be scaled and used to improve patient safety. To learn more about this poster program we spoke to UHN’s Indira Gobin, Clinical Manager, Orthopaedics Schroeder Arthritis Program; Laura Pozzobon, Manager, Quality, Safety & Clinical Adoption; and Kerseri Scane, Manager Patient Engagement for Healthcare Improvement – Patient Experience, who collaboratively answered the questions in our Q&A below.

Why do you think Canadian Patient Safety Week is important, and how do you support it?

Through Canadian Patient Safety Week, we are able to raise awareness about the growing global challenge to deliver safe care, as well as share and learn from the actions others are taking nationally to improve patient safety. During this Canadian Patient Safety Week, UHN is focused on strengthening our safety culture through various awareness materials and educational resources.

This week highlights the importance of recognizing and improving the culture of safety in our healthcare system. It speaks volumes for where we have come and opens opportunities for where we are going in patient advocacy and safety. By embedding safety culture as a part of our daily practice, it places safety at the forefront of our care. Collaboration and engagement between patients, families, TeamUHN staff, and Patient Partners (patients and family caregivers who work with UHN staff on initiatives to improve patient safety) is essential in the development of sustainable safety culture interventions.

We learned about the interesting poster initiative at your organization in your article; can you tell us a little more about what the purpose is of the Escalation of Care Working Group and how it works?

Improving the communication of care concerns to the most appropriate team member (“escalation of care” (EOC)) by TeamUHN members, patients, and family is a quality and safety priority at UHN. We recognize that improving EOC can result in improved patient outcomes. Through widespread engagement, UHN’s collaborative Escalation of Care Working Group – composed of Patient Partners and TeamUHN members from across the enterprise – developed and implemented EOC expectations, standardized educational content, tools to support effective EOC by healthcare professionals, and identified a key performance indicator to monitor EOC at the corporate level.

With the purpose of creating safer patient outcomes by cultivating an environment of deep listening, openness, and vulnerability between patients, families, and care providers the Patient & Family Escalation of Care Sub-Working Group came together to focus on the development of tools that enable patients and families to raise care concerns. They also developed tools for staff that support them in responding to those concerns with respect, compassion, and accountability. Led collaboratively by the Patient Experience and Quality, Safety & Clinical Adoption teams, this group is made up of Patient Partners and has representation from the Patient Experience; Quality, Safety & Clinical Adoption; Nursing; Medicine; and Professional Practice teams. Ensuring patients and families are involved in this process is reflective of UHN’s Patient Declaration of Values and is essential to creating safer patient outcomes.

The patient-facing posters used in the Escalation of Care Working Group’s pilot in 9A at Toronto Western Hospital. (Images: UHN)

Do you have any tips for how other healthcare organizations can implement more patient safety measures?

Healthcare organizations delivering care are well-positioned to work collaboratively on improving the safety of care with patients. This can be achieved by engaging interested patients in the co-development of tools and resources and learning from the experiences of those who have accessed care at your organization. Further, developing strong partnerships between the Patient Experience and Quality, Safety & Clinical Adoption teams and Clinical Managers at the local level has been instrumental in our work to date. 

The following are key principles that can help enable this: 

• Incorporate and embed your organization’s legislated Patient Declaration of Values in your patient safety work to ensure it reflects what patients and families told you are important in their care. At UHN this includes Respect & Dignity, Empathy & Compassion, Transparency, Accountability, and Equity & Partnership. 
• Ensure that any patient safety improvement created includes patient and family partnership in care.
• Engage Patient Partners in the design and decision-making process about patient safety improvement activities.
• Support and engage staff in the implementation of any patient safety improvement activity.
• Build a sustainability plan that ensures safety culture is supported from the beginning. At UHN, this includes ensuring TeamUHN staff learn about communication tools and incident reporting & learning to support a safety culture at Employee Orientation, both at the local and corporate level, and providing opportunities for support and discussion at Daily Unit Huddles where teams consistently have the opportunity for identification and mitigation of patient safety risks.

CPSW is a great opportunity to showcase how your organization is promoting patient safety. Let us know how you are making an impact or celebrating CPSW by contacting us at communications@hiroc.com.

Before #CPSW2023 began, we spoke to Healthcare Excellence Canada’s President and CEO Jennifer Zelmer and HIROC’s CEO Catherine Gaulton to learn more about what CPSW means to them and to share some great examples of healthcare organizations’ patient safety initiatives. Check out what they had to say in this video.