Planning Canadian Patient Safety Week activities

Are you ready to engage your team or organization during Canadian Patient Safety Week?  

Canadian Patient Safety Week (CPSW) 2024 is designed to bring together people involved in delivering and receiving care to explore and address healthcare harm and create safer care for all. There are many ways to help broaden your organization or care team’s understanding of harm including putting up posters, facilitating discussions or activities, hosting events and more. 

We’ve put together some resources to support you, no matter what you're planning:

• Register for the campaign and order free swag to share, including pens, stickers and posters, that you can share with others in your organization and at your events. You can also download and print our CPSW 2024 poster (PDF 19MB).
• Use our activity card to facilitate discussions about healthcare harm with your team.
• Share other CPSW 2024 learning resources, like our infographic (PDF 752MB) and the Rethinking Patient Safety discussion guide.

Learn from others  

Teams at Ross Memorial Hospital in Ontario and Nova Scotia Health offer their advice for organizing Canadian Patient Safety Week activities, based on their own experiences:

1. Start planning early. “The more time you have,” says Ross Memorial’s Steven Lofkrantz, “the more effort you put into it, the better it is.” Heather Cochrane and Lisa MacSween from Nova Scotia Health emphasize being “reflective and intentional” as you plan your programming.
2. Stay positive—and make your initiatives fun and engaging for a very wide audience. “People have got to want to participate,” says Lofkrantz. “Whatever you do, it has to resonate with your staff and patients—otherwise it’s not worth doing.” Activities should be interactive—and celebratory.
3. Get input from all departments. “You do better when working as a team,” says Lofkrantz. “If people have a hand in developing your program, they will embrace it more.” Cochrane and MacSween say you can pull off impactful CPSW activities with a small, dedicated group meeting regularly. While quality and safety can take the lead, multi-disciplinary participation is key.
4. Make your messaging accessible and clear to a general audience. Avoid jargon and medical terminology that could confuse those with different levels of healthcare literacy, including patients and families.
5. Cultivate patient safety partnerships and share knowledge as much as possible both internally and externally.
6. Seek management support early in the process. This can help manage time and resources. CPSW initiatives do not need to be costly or overly time-consuming. Sometimes simple, creative ideas can be the most engaging.
7. Offer promotional materials and swag, if possible, including materials from Healthcare Excellence Canada.
8. Use CPSW as a catalyst to create ongoing patient safety dialogue throughout the year.