​The Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Framework, developed in the United Kingdom by Charles Vincent, Susan Burnett and Jane Carthey, draws together academic evidence and practical experience to provide an expanded framework and approach to safety measurement and monitoring. Building on best practices identified in healthcare and in other industries, the Framework consists of five dimensions, and a series of prompting key questions, that guide users to comprehensively and conceptually address a patient safety issue.

Since 2016, CPSI has been working with healthcare teams from across Canada to advance our knowledge and experience of the Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Framework in Canada.  Key learnings from the Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Collaboratives in Canada include:

The Measurement and Monitoring of Safety Framework (MMSF):

• Creates a more holistic view of safety
• Changes our safety focus – moving away from a focus on past harm.
• Provides a shared and consistent understanding of safety
• Changes the way we think about safety
• Helps us move away from managing risk to managing safety
• Moves us from assurance and accountability reporting to a "practice of inquiry"
• Empowers everyone to take a proactive role in safety
• Promotes a culture of collective responsibility for safety
• Promotes an understanding that staff and patient safety go hand in hand
• Places value on soft intelligence (e.g. listening, observing and perceiving)  
• Recognizes the value that patients and caregivers have in creating safety
  

"A lot of patient safety has been chasing after things that has happened before. You will see things like policy, or regulation trying to fix what happened or what harm we have seen in the past. I think what we are seeing now is this emergence of creating safety, that past harm is not the same as creating safe systems or creating safety. I think in the past we have connected it with [harm]. If you've got harm then you aren't safe or if you can just get rid of all that harm, or focus on where we have had critical harm, we'll be safer. I think that was a fallacy. We are in a very complex environment and that really anticipating, reacting, responding doesn't come through a policy or a checklist. It comes through the dynamics that happens in a team, the way people think, make sense of things. I think that is a difference I am seeing in how we are thinking about safety."

Dr. Petrina McGrath, Executive Director Quality and Safety, Saskatchewan Health Authority