Quality Improvement & Safety

Patient Safety & Quality Culture

The Patient Safety and Quality Culture Strategy Framework was developed to define and facilitate monitoring of the impact of contributors on our organizational culture of patient safety - establishing strategies to address identified areas for improvement. Modeled after the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) Patient Safety Culture ‘Bundle', it includes three main areas of focus: 1) Enabling: leadership practices that motivate the pursuit of safety; 2) Enacting: frontline actions that improve safety; and 3) Learning: learning practices that reinforce safe behaviors.

Supporting Patient Safety and Quality Culture Strategy, the quality improvement and safety team and the performance and analytics team collaborated to develop a dashboard concept, with the intention to bring data from various sources together in a single location. This provides a user friendly, simple, yet comprehensive visual on important patient safety culture information that can be used to examine and understand performance at the organizational and zone levels.  The dashboard incorporates practices from the Bundle and includes indicators chosen from existing Health Standards Organization and Accreditation Canada tools wherever possible. Indicators that did not map to an existing survey or tool were selected due to their alignment with organizational priorities.

While still in early days of using the dashboard, the Nova Scotia Health (NSH) Patient Safety and Quality Culture Strategy Indicator Dashboard template (without data) has been made available for reference.