healthcare provider and patient/resident walking and having a safety conversation

Resources for healthcare providers and leaders 

When healthcare workers, patients, residents, clients and caregivers – who are also known as essential care partners – prioritize talking about safety and acting on the insights, outcomes and experiences can improve for everyone.

In this section :

  • Press Play on Safety Conversations

Safety conversations are an important step in building a proactive patient safety culture.  They’re a respectful discussion about safety between two or more people involved in organizing, delivering, and seeking or receiving care. Safety conversations help us understand what harm – as well as feeling and being safe – mean to all involved. These conversations are not an ‘additional project’ – they can help you do what you’re already doing, better. 

Safety conversations are part of a culture shift that promotes an understanding that staff and patient safety go hand-in-hand, and that recognizes the value of patients, residents, clients, essential care partners and healthcare workers in creating safety together.

Resources

Our curated list of tools and resources, from quick tip sheets to comprehensive reports and frameworks, can help you to have safety conversations and support safer care of older adults.

Featured Resource 

How to Have Safety Conversations: A Resource for Healthcare Providers  

Whether you want to fine-tune your safety conversations or just get started, this resource will guide you in having effective safety conversations with patients, residents and clients.

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How to Have Safety Conversations: A Resource for Patients and Caregivers  

Share this resource with your patients, residents and clients to help them prepare for safety conversations.

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“What makes you feel safe” posters

Provide these posters to your patients, clients, residents and their essential care partners to help create an environment for them to openly participate in safety conversations.

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Presence of Safety  

Find out how Healthcare Excellence Canada is supporting a transformative shift from seeing safety as the absence of harm, to a more holistic approach that fosters safe, inclusive care. 

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Engagement Capable Environments Organizational Self-Assessment Tool 

Engagement-capable environments create and sustain a culture of patient-and family-centred care, and patient partnership, that seeks to improve healthcare quality, safety and experience. This practice-based tool supports meaningful engagement at an organizational level.

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A Journey We Walk Together: Strengthening Indigenous Cultural Competency in Health Organizations 

Indigenous cultural competency is vital to providing safe, high-quality services. For organizations to become more culturally competent, they need culturally competent people who are supported by intentional structures and effective processes. Consider where your organization is on its journey toward cultural competency and explore how you can improve your structures and processes to achieve better outcomes.

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Canadian Quality and Patient Safety Framework Evaluation 

Discover how organizations have been using the Canadian Quality and Patient Safety framework to improve patient safety in their organizations.

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