On this page:
Taking action
Patient safety is a priority at The Ottawa Hospital and we strive to create a culture that:
- Acknowledges the high risk and error-prone nature of health-care activities.
- Creates a blame-free environment where individuals can report errors and close calls without fear of punishment.
- Builds an expectation of collaboration to seek solutions and create action plans.
- Diverts organizational resources to address safety concerns.
Centre for Patient Safety
The Ottawa Hospital’s Centre for Patient Safety is a virtual centre created to guide us in providing the safest patient care through nationally recognized research, education and evaluation methods.
The centre is a result of a strong collective commitment from clinicians and renowned researchers at our hospital and the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute to improve the safety of patient care.
Patient experience surveying
At The Ottawa Hospital, we strive for continuous improvement, and are committed to providing exceptional, patient-centred and compassionate care. A critical piece in fulfilling our mission and vision is understanding a patient’s experience when they receive care from us. This is why we invite patients to complete patient surveys and evaluate the results. Many different patient experience surveys are in use across the hospital.
Quality Improvement Plan
In compliance with Ontario’s Excellent Care for All Act, which came into law in June 2010, The Ottawa Hospital is pleased to share its Quality Improvement Plan (QIP). The vision of The Ottawa Hospital is to provide each patient with world-class care, exceptional service and compassion that we would want for our loved ones. We strive to provide our patients with care that is accessible, effective, efficient, safe and centred on their needs. At The Ottawa Hospital, quality means delivering on all these elements. Our goal is to attain a top 10 per cent status among North American hospitals in the delivery of safe, high-quality care. The QIP is a road map toward attaining that goal.
For more information, please refer to the following documents:
The Ottawa Hospital:
Quality Improvement Plan Narrative
Quality Improvement Plan Workplan
Ontario Ministry of Health:
Excellent Care for All Act
Previous year’s QIP:
Health Quality Ontario – QIP Navigator
Situational awareness and patient safety
Human factors have been identified by the medical community as a key for increasing safety. Despite this, there is minimal training on human factors in the medical field.
A needs assessment conducted with physicians from various medical disciplines, nurses, medical educators, patient safety personnel and human factors professionals, identified situational awareness—a foundational human factor—as the most important and least understood human factor.
With the support of the Canadian Medical Protective Association, this learning package was developed to train physicians on situational awareness as a way to enhance patient safety. The learning package includes a primer on situational awareness and patient safety and a presentation slide set with instructors’ notes to support instructors in situational awareness and patient safety training. It also has three individual instructional modules—for instructors, participants and self-instruction—that allow the user to practice their learning in hypothetical cases in a range of clinical settings.
For a brief overview of situational awareness, its processes, potential obstacles and impact on patient safety, download the shortened version of the Situational Awareness and Patient Safety Primer in both official languages.
Hand hygiene
Every year in Canada patients die or become seriously ill from infections acquired in hospitals. It is estimated that at least 30 per cent of hospital-acquired infections are preventable. Bacteria that cause infections are most frequently spread from one patient to another on the hands of health-care workers.
Scientific evidence shows that hand hygiene is the single most important way of controlling the spread of germs.
To promote and improve hand hygiene, The Ottawa Hospital takes part in the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care’s Just Clean Your Hands program. This evidence-based program builds on work done by the World Health Organization and the United Kingdom. It was specifically designed for Ontario hospitals and was successfully pilot tested in 10 Ontario hospitals, including The Ottawa Hospital.
The goals of the program are to:
- Improve hand hygiene practices among health-care workers.
- Attain and sustain long-term improvement in the hand hygiene practices among Ontario’s health-care workers.
- Build a culture of hand hygiene compliance where infection prevention and control is everyone’s business.
For more information, visit Just Clean Your Hands.