Quality & Safety Response
The human impact of a patient safety incident on the patient, their family, the health-care providers directly involved, as well as the ramifications on the system itself including the economic burden are significant.
Disclosure is an ethical, professional and legal obligation. Patients and their families, governments, regulatory licensing authorities, and Canadian courts expect health providers to be knowledgeable and accountable for their actions and for their responses to patient safety incidents. Open, honest, and empathetic disclosure and appropriate apologies benefit patients and families, health providers, and their organizations. Patients and families impacted by a patient safety incident want to know the extent of harm, the facts about how it happened, and what measures can be undertaken to prevent the harm in the future.
Health-care providers are able to recognize patient safety incidents, and take responsibility to respond in a timely way with empathy and compassion to meet urgent clinical, emotional, and information needs, and to provide follow-up as required of their patients.
Health-care providers report these incidents to their leaders, team members and colleagues, and support these individuals as needed.
Patients and/or their family are told about the occurrence of harm in a timely manner. A commitment is made to provide the factual reasons for what happened as soon as these are known and in a timely manner to the patient and/or their family.
To mitigate harm, the health-care provider and team effectively address the patient’s immediate clinical needs and plan with the patient and/or their family for further ongoing care.
Safety Incident Immediate Response and Reporting Policy
Key patient safety processes are defined based on legislation/support for the process with key leads for each process - see Definitions of Key Patient Safety Processes.