Improving Equity in Health Care Through Hospital Safety Monitoring Systems

Study goals
The overarching goal of our research is to integrate equity in incident reporting and patient complaints systems in Canadian hospitals. Incident reporting and patient complaints systems are structured hospital processes for reporting, analyzing and addressing adverse events and patient concerns and contributing factors.

However, these systems are not currently designed to attend to equity considerations such as the ways that ethnicity, language, gender, geography, age, socioeconomic status, and disability affect patient safety. Through various research approaches, this study will identify the changes needed to ensure inclusion of equity features required to identify, study and address systemic sources of equity-related harm while being mindful of the potential need for new safety monitoring models.

Level of Engagement

This opportunity is at the level of Inform on the IAP2 Spectrum of Public Participation.

Eligibility

• Specific health care experiences [details below]
• Scope of patient engagement: As part of this research, we are seeking to conduct one-on-one interviews with individuals (“patients”) who have experienced a preventable harm event while hospitalized and whose experiences may have been shaped by equity-related factors. We are particularly interested in speaking with individuals who have participated in hospital incident and/or patient concerns reporting systems to learn about both positive and negative experiences with these processes. We are also interested in interviewing family members and/or caregivers of these individuals. These individuals will be from the provinces of Alberta, British Columbia or Ontario.

Patient Partners ARE NOT required to be PVN members to participate in this engagement opportunity.

Health Care Partner Contact Information

Allison Kooijman PhD Candidate, School of Nursing | University of British Columbia (250) 307-9200 allison.kooijman@ubc.ca