Feb 15, 2023
A Health Quality Council (HQC) employee and two HQC board members have published articles in a special issue of Healthcare Quarterly that is focused on patient safety.
Gary Teare, HQC’s executive director of measurement and analysis services, has written an article entitled “Measurement of Quality and Safety in Healthcare: The Past Decade and the Next.” In it, he “calls for a critical assessment of the impact of investments made in the measurement of quality and safety, and reflects on whether a reorientation of some of this investment is required to realize the healthcare quality and safety improvement the system seeks.”
Teare “also reflects on several Canadian initiatives that have been typical and draws on the experience of health systems that have used measurement to great effect to suggest how investments in healthcare quality and safety measurement should be focused in the future,” according to the article’s abstract.
HQC board member G. Ross Baker has written an introduction to the new issue of Healthcare Quarterly, entitled “An Opportunity for Reflection.” He acknowledges that 2014 marks two significant 10-year anniversaries in “the evolution of safer patient care in Canada”: the launch of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) and the publication of the results of the Canadian Adverse Events Study. In addition, Baker has published another article in the same issue, entitled “Governance, Policy and System-Level Efforts to Support Safer Healthcare.”
HQC board member Dennis Kendel has published a commentary entitled “Are We Afraid to Use Regulatory and Policy Levers More Aggressively to Optimize Patient Safety?” In it, Kendel writes that “healthcare is a very labour-intensive process. The performance, individually and collectively, of a diverse array of healthcare workers has profound implications for the safety of care provided to patients and clients. It is worthwhile to consider how effectively we have used regulatory and policy levers over the past 10 years to assure optimally safe performance by the entire healthcare workforce.”
The October 2014 special issue (Vol. 17) of Healthcare Quarterly is the seventh in a series of “Patient Safety Papers.” To read the articles or to download a PDF of the issue, visit http://www.longwoods.com/publications/healthcare-quarterly/23902.
