Patient Safety

Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) is committed to inform and educate clients and families in writing and verbally about the client and family’s role in promoting safety.

Inviting PMH clients and families to be partners in achieving safe care is needed.

We want you to be safe:

• During a clinic visit
• When receiving outpatient care
• When visiting other patients
  Please Speak Up! during your health
  appointments. This will help the
  provision of safe quality care.

Patients are invited to share their experiences with Prairie Mountain Health. This can be done by:

• Talking directly to your health care providers
• Participating in a patient and family engagement opportunity
• Filling out a Client Experience Questionnaire
• Sharing your concerns

If you wish to get more involved by partnering with Prairie Mountain Health to participate in improvement opportunities, please contact a Patient Relations Representative by emailing us at [email protected].

If you wish to share an experience or discuss a concern click here.

S – Speak up if you have questions or concerns. It’s Safe to ask

• What is my health problem?
• What do I need to do?
• Why do I need to do this?

P -Prevent Falls. Everyone is considered at risk for falls. To help prevent falls:

• MOVE your body. Wear safe shoes.
• IMPROVE your health
• REMOVE hazards and obstacles

E – Engage in your health care journey.

• Partner with your family and health care providers
• Be involved in your care

A – Ask your health care provider questions

• An advocate is someone that can help you on your health care journey
• Ask a family member or friend to be your advocate

K – Keep a list on the “It’s Safe to Ask About Your Medications” card.

• Include herbals, vitamins, patches and eye drops
• Show your list to your healthcare provider

U – Use hand hygiene products

• Soap and water, or hand sanitizer
• Cough or sneeze into a tissue or the bend of your arm
• Often to prevent the spread of germs

P – Participate with your health care provider in your care.

• Present your Manitoba Health card when registering for health services
• Use My Patient Passport to keep track of your health information
• Share your passport with health care provider

It’s Safe to Ask encourages patients and families to request the information they need in order to become active participants in their care. It includes easy-to-read materials for patients. Healthcare providers can also use this information with patients and families. Read more.

Patients are encouraged to ask questions about any medications they are prescribed. The resources below can help patients have a conversation with their health-care provider about their current prescriptions. Read more.

Choosing Wisely is a campaign to help health-care providers and patients talk about what tests, treatments and procedures are supported by research, are free from harm, are truly necessary, and right for patients. Choosing Wisely calls upon leading medical specialty societies and other organizations to identify tests or procedures commonly used in their field whose necessity should be questioned and discussed with patients.
Choosing Wisely Canada has many patient-friendly materials, meant to help patients learn about tests, treatments, and procedures and to question, when they are necessary and when they are not, and what patients can do to improve their health.
Choosing Wisely Manitoba works with clinicians, patients, researchers and health care leaders to help them engage in conversations about unnecessary tests, treatments and procedures, with the intention of facilitating high-quality care for Manitobans.

• Choosing Wisely Manitoba
• Choosing Wisely Canada

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related hospital admission and death among older Canadian adults, and the leading cause of hospital admission for injury amongst babies and children aged 1 to 14.

Many falls can be prevented through understanding the risk factors and taking action. Read more.

Everyone working in health care tries to keep patients, clients, and residents safe. Most of the time, care goes as planned. Sometimes, even with the best care, unexpected things can happen. These are called patient safety events.

A patient safety event can include:

• An event where someone is harmed
• An event where no harm occurs
• A “close call,” where something almost happened but did not

Reporting Safety Concerns

Prairie Mountain Health strives for a strong culture of safety in that everyone is encouraged to report and learn from patient safety incidents. Reporting helps us learn and improve care for everyone. Clients and families may report patient safety incidents differently than staff members, but everyone is encouraged to report.

We use a secure, online reporting system used across the province. This system helps us to:

• Look at safety events quickly
• Understand where problems may be happening
• Learn how to make care safer
• Make better decisions using real information

Staff across the province report safety events in the same way. This helps the right people receive the information quickly and take action when needed.

How This Helps Patients and Families

Reporting safety events helps the health care system respond quickly and improve care. It allows us to:

• Understand what happened
• Support patients, families, and staff
• Reduce the chance of the same thing happening again
• Reach our goal of providing safe, high quality care for all patients.

What Happens After a Safety Event

If a patient safety event occurs, the first steps are to:

• Make sure anyone affected gets the care and support they need
• Reduce any immediate safety risks

We also look closely at what happened. Sometimes we review one event. Other times we look at many events to find patterns. Both help us learn how to improve care. After review, some serious patient safety events may be recognized as a critical incident.

What is a Critical Incident?

As determined by Manitoba Health, a critical incident is an unintended event that occurs when health services are provided to a person and result in an effect to him or her that:

• Is serious and undesired, such as death, disability, injury or harm, unplanned admission to hospital or unusual extension of a hospital stay; and
• Does not result from the person’s underlying health condition or from a risk inherent in providing the health services

This means the unintended event does not result from the patient’s illness or the risk in treating the illness, but from the health services provided.

Manitoba has legislation that determines whether or not an event meets the requirements to be classified as a critical incident, as well as the requirements for how it is to be managed.

All information related to a critical incident is confidential and privileged. This means that any information related to a critical incident will not be shared outside of the review.

Examples of serious patient harm that could be a critical incident may include:

• Being operated on the wrong area of the body
• Receiving the wrong medicine or wrong dose of a medicine that results in serious patient harm
• Delaying treatment or not receiving treatment that results in preventable serious harm

For more information on Manitoba Critical Incident Reporting Guidelines, please visit Manitoba Critical Incident Reporting Guidelines | Health | Province of Manitoba.

If you have a patient and/or family concern, please contact our Patient Comment Line at (toll free) 1-800-735-6596 or 204-578-2104 or email your concern to [email protected].

For more information on patient safety reports, please visit Manitoba Health, Seniors and Active Living’s Patient Safety.

Canadian Patient Safety Week is a national, annual campaign that started in 2005 to inspire extraordinary improvement in patient safety and quality. As the momentum for promoting best practices in patient safety has grown, so has the participation in Canadian Patient Safety Week. Canadian Patient Safety week is relevant to anyone who engages with our healthcare system: providers, patients, and citizens. Working together, thousands help spread the message to Ask. Listen. Talk.

Canadian Patient Safety Week is held each year at the end of October.