Every Patient Matters, an IHI Patient Activist member on Facebook, writes:
Imagine a hospital where a patient who says they feel unsafe is asked, what’s wrong? What can we do to make you safer? Rather than being flagged as difficult. So many times, it’s the hospital that is wrong. I don’t care if you think I’m unsafe, you should care that I feel unsafe and help me feel safer by addressing my concerns as if they were as important as your own.
What would a “right to safe care” look like? Imagine, for a second, what it would be like, if a patient really had a right to feel safe in the hospital, like they have the right to feel safe in their workplace, at least according to Canadian law. You can call in the labour inspector to a factory, but where is the patient safety inspector in a hospital? I want one and I want their number. And I don’t want them working for the hospital.
Oh yeah, I want a patient safety inspector too. Wish I woulda thought of this; it’s huge.
Thanks so much for referencing my idea in your blog!
This is one of my major goals for the Canadian healthcare system – to have an independent patient safety office or tribunal with independent inspectors who have the power to do spot investigations, generate binding recommendations, hand out daily fines for non-compliance, and measure patient reports of error and the success or failure of recommendations for improvements to patient safety.
The difference between this and hospital accreditation would be that the client is the public and that the office is independent of both government health ministries and the healthcare industry. The patient safety inspectors would be located in each hospital but paid for by this patient safety tribunal/office.
Each inspector would have to respond to every patient-initiated “flag” (patients would be given written instructions on how to trigger that flag) and the inspector would have to record the demographics of the patient and the area of concern. Flags, without identifiable information, would be publicly reported in aggregate.
With this tool, we could better measure the number of errors reported by patients, rather than by hospitals. Patients would also have a “card” to use if they feel unsafe, and the availability of this tool to the patient would hopefully act as an incentive to hospitals to ensure that patients feel safe at all times.
Does anyone know if anything similar exists in any jurisdiction in the world, and if so, how well it works?
To discuss this issue further, please contact me by email at impatient4change@gmail.com . I’m also on Facebook at Every Patient Matters. And you can check out my blog at http://www.impatient4change.blogspot.com . Thanks and hope to talk to you about this soon!
There are supposed to be advocates, ombudsmen in hospitals, but no one I have dealt with has ever been saved by one of them. However, a new position created in the healthcare industry that would need to be funded, this one might just work Bart and EPM, GREAT IDEA.. I am NOT kidding, money talks.