Keeping your child safe is important to everyone at Holland Bloorview
Even with our best efforts, incidents of harm can occur at the hospital.
Caring Safely is our commitment to keeping our clients, families and staff safe in everything that we do. It is a proactive approach that allows us to identify where safety issues may arise and then prevent them. Our aim is to advance Holland Bloorview’s safety culture transformation and journey to become a high reliability organization.
To support our culture transformation we have our 4 working groups:
- Cause Analysis (CA)-to optimize our safety event analysis capabilities, and improving how we can learn from events of harm within HB and across other hospitals in the network;
- Error Prevention (EP) –to train all HB staff to adopt behaviour expectations for EP as individuals and team work habits;
- Leadership Methods (LM)–to train our HB leaders in high reliability leadership principles and methods that will sharpen their skills and reduce variation in leadership approaches;
- And the creation of a Safety Coach program (SC)- a curriculum to train EP champions to observe employee work behaviours and to provide feedback about practice and compliance with our behaviour expectations, through reinforcing the use of error prevention tools.
In addition, under the Caring Safely creativity we will continue to advance and sustain best practices to reduce hospital acquired pressure injuries (Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries-HAPI initiative) and start targeted improvement work to prevent client falls and reduce employee/staff harm (ESS).
How are we demonstrating our commitment to safety?
- We are using an evidence-based (research) approach to improve safety, and to focus on changing the culture of safety within the hospital.
- We joined the Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS) Network, a network of over 140 children’s hospitals across North America. The SPS Network is a collaborative effort among children’s hospitals to transform pediatric patient safety with the ambitious goal to eliminate serious harm across all children’s hospitals.
Holland Bloorview’s areas of patient safety focus
The Caring Safety goals are a combination of education and process/methodology implementation categorised under Culture, Employee Staff Safety (ESS) and Hospital Acquired Conditions (HACs).
A hospital-acquired condition (HAC) is a medical condition or complication that a patient develops during a hospital stay, which was not present at admission. In most cases, hospitals can prevent HACs when the care provided aligns with research that shows the best results for most patients.
We aim to reduce HACs by taking the following actions:
- Introduced SPS Network recommended pressure injury evidence-based care practices
- To reduce hospital acquired pressure injuries, we adopted a new client risk assessment tool that is sensitive to mobility and devices, while flagging clients who are at-risk of developing pressure injuries.
- We have introduced an evidence-based bundle of techniques that reduces pressure injuries when applied consistency, as well as a pressure injury audit process to confirm the evidence-based bundle of techniques have been applied to care.
Promoting a safer workplace for clients and staff
- Advance our culture of safety by modeling safety as a core value and to keep safety at ‘top of mind in the thinking and decision making of ourselves and others’:
- 12 hospital committees have committed to sharing safety stories at their monthly meetings to keep safety at ‘top of mind in the thinking and decision making of ourselves and others’ during the meeting and advance our culture of safety by modeling safety as a core value.
- Maintain awareness of operations and immediate problems impacting the front line and our employees:
- New Rehabilitation and Continuing Complex Care unit Point of Care (POC) huddles have been introduced for our Allied health staff, on a weekly basis by each inpatient unit based on SPS’ recommended structure to maintain awareness of operations and immediate problems impacting the front line and our employees.
- Strengthen our “Good Catch” program - an action-oriented program that highlights what actions were taken by an employee to prevent harm from happening.
- Having a Good Catch program ‘celebrates the culture of safety’ and encourages staff and family members to report concerns.
- Promote our workplace violence policy.
- Best practice recommendations from the SPS Network were added into our workplace violence and code white policy.
- We will also be implementing a: Cause Analysis program; Error Prevention training; Leadership Methods and a Safety Coach program.
I’m a caregiver – how can I help with safety?
We know that children stay safer when their parents are informed and participate in their care. Help us keep your child safe:
- Speak up when you have a concern.
- Ask questions when you need clarity or better understanding.
- Participate during health care team rounding. Provide your input and insight into your child’s care.
- Know that you are an important member of our hospital’s care team.
Working together is the best way to keep your child safe and help us achieve our goal of ‘All safe. Always’.
Caring Safely is an ambitious safety initiative of Holland Bloorview that will have significant impact in making care better and safer for clients, families and employees across the hospital, and make the hospital an even safer place to work.
Caring Safely: All Safe, Always!
