Communicating After Harm in Healthcare was developed by the Canadian Patient Safety Institute to assist you and your organization throughout the process of communicating after patient safety incidents that resulted in harm. This document can help to guide organizations with strategies and tactics for communicating harm in healthcare with various audiences including social media.
This document is intended to replace the Guidelines for Informing the Media After an Adverse Event. Since those guidelines were originally published in 2009, the communications landscape has changed significantly, and stakeholders are expecting more accountability and transparency from healthcare and health professional organizations.
The purpose of this document is to provide support for healthcare and health professional organizations that need to share information about patient safety incidents that caused harm. When implementing this process, each patient safety incident is individual, and each response must be customized appropriately.
If you have any questions or comments you'd like to share about the Communicating After Harm in Healthcare guidelines, please feel free to email us at
info@cpsi-icsp.ca.