The Patient Safety Education Program – Canada (PSEP – Canada) is pleased to recognize Prairie Mountain Health and Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre as the 2015 recipients of the Innovations in Patient Safety Education Awards.

"The Innovations in Patient Safety Education Awards provide an opportunity for healthcare organizations to share and be recognized for their work in patient safety education," says Joan Fernandez, Patient Safety Improvement Lead, Canadian Patient Safety Institute. "Award recipients are selected based on how their specific education initiatives, along with the use of the PSEP – Canada program, enhanced patient safety education in their organization and yielded leading practices that can be applied to other healthcare organizations across the country. Both organizations have embodied successes that are scalable and can be adapted elsewhere. Congratulations to the 2015 award recipients!"

Power of One Award – Prairie Mountain Health

Jennifer Newitt is a skilled educator who sees the opportunities in others to improve the safety of care. She became a PSEP – Canada certified Patient Safety Trainer in May 2012. For the past three years, Jennifer has supported the PSEP – Canada program for Prairie Mountain Health, a health region with almost 8,500 employees located in south western Manitoba.

Jennifer Newitt​

As a Regional Clinical Educator for Prairie Mountain Health, Jennifer has incorporated the PSEP – Canada curriculum into a number of initiatives, including: embedding PSEP – Canada content into Hand Hygiene Education for Nursing Skills Blitz Days; utilizing the medication safety content for Home Care medication education for Home Care Attendants; helping educator colleagues to embed PSEP – Canada curriculum into their education sessions when and where possible/appropriate;  leading sessions as an instructor for the regional PSEP Patient Safety Ambassador course; and working as part of a group to establish regional intranet access for the Prairie Mountain Health Educators and Patient Safety Ambassadors for PSEP – Canada, and local program content developed from PSEP – Canada materials.

"Jennifer's positive attitude and enthusiasm truly embody the attributes of the ideal PSEP – Canada educator," says Kristi Chorney, Regional Manager of Patient Safety, Quality and Risk, Prairie Mountain Health. "Jennifer is willing to take risks and try various approaches such as team discussions, participation and activities in her work. Her desire to improve and her keen interest in patient safety have been key to our success in implementing the PSEP – Canada curriculum across the region."

"Receiving the Power of One Award is truly an honour," says Jennifer Newitt. "This is really a team win that recognizes the work of the entire Quality Patient Safety and Risk team to advance patient safety education throughout Prairie Mountain Health."

Power of an Organization Award – Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

The Sunnybrook iLead Quality & Patient Safety Program helps to equip and motivate frontline staff of all professions to engage in effective quality and patient safety improvement activities. Sunnybrook has developed two certificate programs (fundamental and advanced) that focus on quality improvement methods, measurement, systems thinking, human factors, change management, Lean, FMEA, Root Cause Analysis and other essential patient safety science practices. Themes of teamwork and communication, interprofessionalism, safety culture and patient/family engagement are interwoven throughout the entire curriculum.

The PSEP – Canada curriculum, particularly the interactive teaching methods, videos, and exercises, was used to substantially enhance the materials that were developed in the pilot year of the program. The PSEP – Canada curriculum provided an innovative set of multi-media tools and exercises that had not traditionally been used, to bring the eductional sessions to the next level for learners.

The objective of the iLead Program is to establish a critical mass of frontline staff across clinical and non-clinical areas to improve the quality and safety of the services, and to involve participants in hospital-wide quality and patient safety strategies. The innovative approach of the iLead Program provides practical supports to help participants achieve real improvements, including:  just-in-time coaching to ensure projects set off in the right direction, standard tools to ensure all staff are speaking the same improvement language and using the same processes, and access to the iLead Data Portal to enhance the measurement and tracking of improvements.

Participants have supported many improvement projects, applying the tools and skills learned in the iLead Program; examples include: decreasing identification errors in the operating room; increasing availability of ambulance reports in the ED for better diagnosis and treatment; enhancing accuracy of jaundice monitoring processes to improve treatment of and reduce readmissions for jaundice; and Improving accuracy of orders for ultrasound testing for high-risk mothers.

To date, Sunnybrook has delivered 30 certificate courses, with 383 iLead Certificate Program enrollees (fundamental and advanced). The 17 graduates from the Fundamentals Certificate Program have developed 10 standard support tools and engaged in 20 hours of project consultations. There are more than 400 users of the iLead Data Portal, which contains 33 quality and safety indicators for tracking improvements. In addition, there have been some 13,361 hits on the iLead website.

The iLead program has also developed partnerships with the Sunnybrook Leadership Institute to align with their existing programs and priorities.  They have also collaborated  with leaders in the Interprofessional Practice department to provide additional training to more than 500 interprofessional champions responsible for implementing quality and safety priorities for the interprofessional practice group, which are also key priorities for the organization overall.

"We are so honoured and excited to be recognized for the Power of an Organization Award," says Brigette Hales, Director, Quality & Patient Safety. "The award recognizes all the people at Sunnybrook who may not necessarily have a formal role in quality or patient safety, but who are committed to make things better to improve the patient experience and their outcomes."

"The key to our success with the iLead program is that you need willing participants. It is about more than just our faculty learning about how to use storytelling,or how to incorporate some of the examples from PSEP – Canada to help deliver the content. We have an enormous group of enthusiastic learners, who come to the courses, without dedicated time to go back to their units and apply what they have learned. These are frontline clinicians who are crazy busy, but still see an opportunity to make something better, and want to learn more about how to do that. It is great to be able to have a resource to give them that provides the tools, skills and teaching to go out and do it."

Click here for more information on the PSEP – Canada  Innovations in Patient Safety Education Awards.  An educational webinar is being planned for later this fall to highlight the work of the award recipients. Watch the CPSI website for more details.

(Left to Right): Nicole D'Angelo, Shamena Maharaj, Guna Budrevics, Tracey DasGupta, Brigette Hales, and Chaitali Desai (Absent: Ru Taggar, Beth O'Leary, AJ Lopez, Cathy Lemieux, and Courtney Miller)