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Safety Competencies Framework – Groundbreaking Project on Interprofessional Education

ARCHIVED INFORMATION

The safety competencies - enhancing patient safety across the health professions

Also available at safetycomp.ca

Working Group terms of reference | Working Group membership | Safety Competencies Conference

Project background
Enabling healthcare providers at the source (e.g. while in training) with the tools and knowledge necessary to build and maintain a safe system is imperative to promote the change necessary to realize CPSI's vision of creating one of the safest health systems in the world. As a result, a key CPSI priority is to identify leading practices and effective interventions in healthcare education.

There is currently a need for a comprehensive, widely accepted patient safety framework that can be incorporated into the education of health professionals in Canada. CPSI is looking to develop a Canadian inter-professional competency-based framework for patient safety through collaborative efforts with partners and other organizations.

In March 2007, a new initiative on the development of a pan-Canadian framework for patient safety competencies spearheaded by CPSI's Advisory Committee on Education and Professional Development was announced. This framework will identify the key knowledge, skills and attitudes related to patient safety for institutions with an interest and responsibility for education and the professional development of practitioners in medicine, nursing, pharmacy and the therapy groups (PT, OT, RT).

The development and integration of a framework of inter-professional patient safety competencies is a critical milestone to accelerate development of regional patient safety curricula. Integration of safety theories and the “how to's” of system improvement into all levels of education and continuing professional development is needed across the spectrum of care.

Project objectives
These are the objectives of the project entitled: The Safety Competencies - Enhancing Patient Safety Across the Health Professions.

To identify the key knowledge, skills and attitudes related to patient safety competencies for all health-care professionals
To develop a simple, powerful, flexible framework that will act as a benchmark for training, educating and assessing health-care professionals in patient safety
To develop a framework that will allow for its smooth integration into curricula at educational institutions, into the professional development programs of health-care associations and directly into patient care sites across the health-care delivery spectrum.
To foster inter-professional and inter-organizational collaboration in patient safety.
To help make patient safety competencies easy for everyone to understand and apply

Project update and timelines

A background paper on the Patient Safety Competencies Project and a survey on the feedback received from national medical, nursing, pharmacy and therapy communities, as well as the themes and components of patient safety, was circulated to the Educational and Professional Development Advisory Committee. The survey served as an environmental scan to review the extent to which patient safety is presently integrated into the educational curricula for health providers.

CPSI subsequently chose the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada as a partner to co-ordinate and facilitate the development of the Canadian Framework of Patient Safety Competencies, now branded as The Safety Competencies Framework. This work follows the methodology of the internationally renowned CanMEDS project. An inter-professional team of expert educators was selected to oversee the project. Members of the Steering Committee are confident that the structure and content of the proposed framework will allow for a smooth integration into the curricula at educational institutions and for healthcare associations responsible for the development of professional development programs across the health delivery spectrum.

The draft framework, now almost completed, contains seven core domains of abilities for all health professionals to incorporate into their work (see Table 1). Each domain will be further developed by groups of volunteer inter-professional educators and content experts who will participate in the several small theme-based working groups (see Table 2). The groups will work over the summer to develop each competency in preparation for the consensus conference on October 14^th in Ottawa. At the conference participants will review and consolidate the results of the theme specific working groups, before the final product is launched in 2008.

Contact information
To contact the project secretariat, please email safetycomp@rcpsc.edu or telephone 613-730-8177, ext. 428.

Table 1
The Safety Competencies Domains

The Safety Competencies Framework provides six core domains of abilities for all health professionals to incorporate into their work. The Safety Competencies are still in draft format, and with much expert input, fall into the following domains:

Domain 1: Contributing to a Culture of Patient Safety

Domain 2: Working in Teams for Patient Safety

Domain 3: Communicating Effectively for Patient Safety

Domain 4: Managing Safety Risk

Domain 5: Optimizing Human and Environmental Factors

Domain 6: Recognizing, Responding and Reporting Adverse Events

1Through the process of developing the content for the framework, the Steering Committee and working group members reduced the original 7 domains to the 6 listed above.