As health care professionals striving to provide the highest level of care and safety, we have a responsibility to listen to our patients, learn from our past experience, and continuously evaluate our practices to identify ways we can improve.
If a patient safety event (an adverse event or a near miss) has shown the the safety of a patient is at risk, it is essential to learn all we can from the incident. Learning is achieved through tools such as safety event reporting, patient safety reviews, and tracking and monitoring trends. More regarding this information can be found on the methods page.
Along with these retrospective activities, we use prospective strategies to prevent and mitigate patient safety events even before they happen.
We also learn by listening to our patients’ feedback, concerns and compliments, so we can target areas for improvement, highlight our successes, and ensure we are delivering the highest quality care for our patients.
Sometimes mistakes happen. When they do, we are committed to finding out why and what can be done to prevent them from happening again. Island Health has a number of systems in place to address what are often called “adverse events,” including systems for reporting events or near-misses, and for carrying out comprehensive reviews of patient safety events, as well as tools to prevent incidents before they happen.
If a patient safety event (an adverse event or a near miss) has shown the safety of a patient is at risk, it is essential to learn all we can from the incident. Learning is achieved through tools such as safety event reporting, patient safety reviews, and tracking and monitoring trends. Along with these retrospective activities, we use prospective strategies to prevent and mitigate patient safety events even before they happen.
We also learn by listening to our patients’ feedback, concerns and compliments, so we can target areas for improvement, highlight our successes, and ensure we are delivering the highest quality care for our patients.
Patient Care Quality Office
Island Health's Patient Care Quality Office (PCQO) provides an accessible and transparent point of contact for patients, their families and their representatives to share their impressions and feedback. This may include compliments or complaints regarding the quality of care provided by Island Health or one of its contracted service providers.
The PCQO may assist with the coordination of a comprehensive and collaborative care quality review. This review can provide patients, families or representatives with answers to their questions about the care that was provided to an Island Health patient. In the event of a complaint, the PCQO works together with program leaders and direct care providers to achieve resolution and support service recovery. Visit the PCQO website to find tips for writing letters to the PCQO, information about related areas in Island Health, and links to other public agencies that provide services similar to those of the PCQO.