October 2013
News Release: Harper Government Takes Steps to Improve Patient Safety - Helping to prevent and reduce harm to Canadians
The Government of Canada is providing the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) with $38.1 million over five years to support work to improve the safety of healthcare that Canadians receive.
CPSI was created to provide leadership in building a culture of patient safety and quality improvement in the Canadian healthcare system.
This funding will support CPSI in continuing its work, which includes:
- Providing leadership and coordination of efforts to prevent and reduce harm to patients;
- Emphasizing education, with a focus on developing curriculum and training programs;
- Coordinating and supporting evidence-informed clinical interventions and programs;
- Conducting research to increase the scope and scale of patient safety research, with a focus on creating tools and resources that can be applied by healthcare organizations
It will also support CPSI in leading the development of a new strategy that will identify priority patient safety areas most likely to lead to system-wide change and to work with its partners to increase the pace of safety improvements.
Since its creation in 2003,CPSI has successfully used federal funding to raise awareness of patient safety issues and drive the creation of a patient safety culture across the country, by:
- Training patient safety experts within healthcare organizations;
- Embedding requirements to develop safety competencies into medical and nursing education programs;
- Developing tools to support patient safety improvement efforts;
- Organizing national conferences and Canadian Patient Safety Week to share patient safety best practices; and
- Ensuring the patient voice is not lost in the efforts to improve the safety and quality of care provided to Canadians.
For example:
- CPSI's flagship initiative, Safer Healthcare Now!, has been voluntarily established in over 700 hospitals and community care settings, where teams use targeted interventions to reduce patient safety incidents (such as surgical site infections, ventilator associated pneumonia infection, and central line blood stream infections).
- CPSI's interventions have been built into national accreditation standards - meaning that any healthcare organization who wants to be accredited must now incorporate safety interventions into its practices.
- CPSI works with provincial and territorial governments to deliver tools and coordinate patient safety and quality improvement programs that support their priorities and/or those of healthcare organizations in their jurisdiction, such as Health Quality Councils.
- CPSI led efforts to create the Canadian Disclosure Guidelines, which are used to provide clear and consistent approach for informing patients and the public when patient safety incidents occur.
- Through its Patients for Patient Safety Canada program, CPSI supports patients and families in sharing their stories so that their perspective is included in quality improvement efforts.
- CPSI has commissioned research in targeted, emerging patient safety areas including primary care, mental health, long term care, emergency medical services, paediatric care and the economics of patient safety.
- CPSI raises awareness of patient safety and shares best practices by hosting the annual Virtual Forum on Patient Safety & Quality Improvement and Canadian Patient Safety Week.
