Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital has developed an innovative engagement framework that’s fostering family partnership in quality and safety improvements.
“As a leader in client and family-centred care, we not only want to meet the new Accreditation Canada requirements with respect to partnering with families, but exceed them,” says Laura Oxenham- Murphy, Manager of Quality at Holland Bloorview.
The innovative framework embeds 16 family leaders in all hospital accreditation working groups, ensuring the patient and family voice influences all QI project and process planning. As part of the Framework, Holland Bloorview also created the Family Leader Accreditation Group (FLAG).
“As family leaders we’re able to share our lived experiences and use a check and balance like system to align Holland Bloorview standards and services with client and family perspectives,” says Adrienne Zarem, family leader and chair of FLAG.
To enable the success of this initiative, Holland Bloorview prepared training, toolkits and ensured role clarity among families and staff. Additionally, through a partnership with the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI), FLAG members were trained in the Patient Safety Education Program (PSEP). Hospital leads and FLAG member Alifa Khan, partnered with CPSI to update the existing PSEP learning modules to reflect the patient and family perspective.
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital youth leaders
Nikoletta Erdelyi, Emma Evans, Cristina Malana and Jeffrey Man (L-R)
participated in patient safety training as part of the Patient Safety Education
Program (PSEP) –Canada. Family and youth leaders are
now able to help train other staff, patients and families to deliver the
program.
“This program lends itself very well to building that capacity. We have untapped potential and untapped capacity in the people we serve. It is our hope, that this will be the impetus for other organizations and that together we can continually build this critical mass that pushes change. We can’t do this without partnering with our families. There are the ones that can see meaningfulness and the authenticity of how we want to change care to make it better for everyone” says Sonia Pagura, Senior Director, Quality, Safety and Performance.
This peer-to-peer training model not only aims to help build capacity among patients and families to make our health system better and safer, but also represents a cultural shift in patient safety that acknowledges the critical importance of the patient and family voice in quality improvement. The hospital aims to train over 200 patients and families in the next few years.