Plenary II - Quality and Safety Culture

Despite all the great work that has taken place around the world to improve the safety of care, harm continues to happen at an alarming rate! In Canada, patient safety incidents are the third leading cause of death behind cancer and heart disease. And a recent national survey showed that very few Canadians are even aware that unintended harm can happen in the health care system. Yet we continue to do the same interventions hoping for different results! So what can we do to change this? During this presentation, you will learn about the winning conditions for creating a patient safety culture and your role in leading that change. The Canadian Patient Safety Institute has adopted a bold new strategy that will be shared as well as the tools that you’ll need in your toolbox to effect the necessary change. And although it should go without saying, patients as true partners will be profiled throughout the session!

Healthcare is very different from aviation; it is more complex, more diverse and much more reliant on human interaction than aviation or other safety-critical industries. This means that approaches to safety used in aviation cannot simply be transferred into healthcare. However, with suitable modification and testing, it might be possible to adapt some aviation safety practices to healthcare.
The approach to investigation of serious accidents and incidents in aviation has led to a significant improvement in safety. The same is not true in healthcare. Most healthcare systems experience recurrent systemic failures but despite the extensive use of incident reporting and investigation, healthcare has not got safer. 
The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch was established by the English healthcare system in 2017 to investigate serious, systemic, patient safety issues using approaches developed from aviation and other safety critical industries. The Chief Investigator is a former pilot who led the UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch and investigators are from a range of backgrounds including healthcare, air, military and marine accident investigation and academia. 

Learning objectives;
By the end of this session delegates will be able to;
1. Describe the different safety models used in other safety-critical industries.
2. Understand how some of these might be applied in different areas of healthcare.
3. Understand the benefits and challenges of adapting safety investigation techniques from aviation into healthcare.