Safety Conversations Action Series 

Now is the Time to Press Play on Safety Conversations

In conjunction with Canadian Patient Safety Week, HEC is launching the Safety Conversations Action Series, a new initiative that will support healthcare teams to have safety conversations with peers, leaders, patients, residents and essential care partners. Conversations can change the way we think about safety. The Action Series follows a learning collaborative format, including three virtual learning sessions, two action periods, with coaching, mentoring and peer-to-peer learning over four months. This initiative builds on past safety improvement collaboratives that applied the Measurement and Monitoring Safety Framework to foster the presence of safety.  

We recognize the pressures on the health system are high right now, so this Action Series is designed to require minimal time and focused effort, while can creating capacity for sustainable improvement.   

Why participate

Everyone wants and deserves safe care. Yet even before the pandemic, safe and high-quality healthcare was not a reality for everyone in Canada and COVID-19 has exposed stark gaps in both care and equity. With health systems across the country under strain, the risk of unintended harm grows. Now more than ever, we need to focus on patient and healthcare provider safety.  

Safety conversations are one way we can all work together to create safety. They are a respectful discussion about safety between two or more people involved in organizing, delivering, seeking, and/or receiving healthcare, including healthcare providers, patients and essential care partners. They are an important step in building a positive patient safety culture, where everyone feels “safe to say” when issues arise.  Healthcare providers, managers and leaders need to be able to talk honestly about the factors that influence their ability to deliver safe care. Patients, residents, clients and their essential care partners need to feel safe to speak up about their care and what they need in order to feel safe. 

By participating in this Action Series, you will: 

• gain access to coaching, mentoring and pan-Canadian peer-to-peer learning 
• enhance your understanding of safety 
• improve your safety conversation skills 
• foster the presence of safety and enhance patient safety culture in your organization  

"We started out in the safety world really worrying about past harm and I think that was really important because it raised peoples' understanding about the magnitude of the safety issues. But it is insufficient because people don't go to work thinking about past incidents; they go to work thinking about the patients they are going to see today. So that is part of the shift now is that we are putting safety into a much more relevant context for the staff on their units doing their daily jobs. I think we can still build on that. We can build a broader sense of how units function and how units interact with other units." Dr. G. Ross Baker, PhD, Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto

For additional information please contact the planning team at safety-securite@hec-esc.ca  

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