Safety Competencies Framework
Educating healthcare providers about patient safety and enabling them to use the tools and knowledge to build and maintain a safe system is fundamental to creating a culture of safety across the spectrum of care.
The 2020 Safety Competencies Framework (2nd Edition) is a simple, powerful and flexible framework that includes enabling competencies that can be adopted and adapted by diverse healthcare programs to design curricula to teach safety and quality for any sector or healthcare program. It can also be a valuable resource to policy makers, regulators and accreditors to guide system change.
The Six Domains support moving patient safety evidence into action and has strengthened its content with advancements in collective knowledge that include patient/family partnership, leadership, quality improvement and cultural competency concepts.
Safety Competencies Framework Domains:
Patient safety culture improvement involves recognizing the importance of ongoing collaboration and the commitment to advocate for change.
High-performing interprofessional teams demonstrate capabilities and competencies that are essential to efficient, effective, and safe collaborative practice.
Effective communication is beneficial to patients and healthcare providers, builds trust, and is a precondition of obtaining patient consent.
Healthcare providers collect and monitor performance data to assess risk and improve outcomes.
Optimizing the human and environmental factors that support the achievement of best human performance is an essential safety competency for all healthcare providers.
Open, honest, and empathetic disclosure and appropriate apologies benefit patients and families, health providers, and their organizations.
