Alberta Health Services' Diana Choma, Clinical Safety Leader and Kelly Chrunik, Clinical Informatics Lead, Child Health, wanted to ensure patients were getting the right care, at the right time, in the right place. They took a deep dive into why they were seeing a delayed reaction in patient deterioration events as a trend provincially.

This deep dive led to the inception of their project, which was to analyze the metrics in early warning systems to improve patient outcomes. The project received support from HIROC's Safety Grants Program.

On the third episode of Share Scale Repeat, Kelly and Diana walk us through the actions they took in the four education cycles, the results from their project, and share advice for healthcare organizations on actioning a new early warning system.

Quotables:

"If staff don't know what to do when an alert fires, the system just becomes noise instead of a safety net. It's really important for institutions to have a protocol in place and socialize this, ensuring they are accessible and ingrained in their everyday safety culture." – K.C

"When it comes to a tool like this, it's not taking away your ability to critical think and it's not there to tell you what you can and can't do. It's there to be a decision support tool for you. It enhances, doesn't replace." – D.C

"Personally, I'm driven by the belief that every interaction is an opportunity to make a positive impact whether that's on patients, colleagues, or the healthcare system as a whole. I think it matters to problem solve together with different professionals." – D.C

"In this project, we had very strong support from our project sponsor. Some days when the tasks felt like it was unreachable…and didn't quite feel like we may reach the finish line, we would check in with our sponsor and have that fire reignited and just that reminder of what we're doing is to support our front-line staff, support patient safety, and hopefully improve patient outcomes." – K.C

Mentioned in this Episode:

· Alberta Health Services

· HIROC

Access more interviews with healthcare leaders at HIROC.com/podcast

Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

On our second episode of Share Scale Repeat, we're taking a closer look at the impact of the HIROC Safety Grants Program, and the dedication of our Subscribers who transform their grants into action. Covenant Health's Mike Hoffman, Fire Safety Consultant, and Tiffany Pybus, Corporate Service Manager, Integrated Services, tell us about their wildland fire suppression system at the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital.

As wildland fires continue to be top of mind for Canadians, so too is the preservation of critical infrastructure within communities. Hospitals play an immense role in not only the re-entry plan after an evacuation, but in representing a sense of community and resilience. With this key knowledge, the team at Covenant Health was motivated to use their HIROC Cultivate Safety Grant towards ensuring the Banff Mineral Springs Hospital is protected and their community remains strong.

Mike and Tiffany give us a deep dive on overcoming the hurdles with being the first healthcare facility in Alberta to implement this system, the importance of proactive wildfire management, and tips for HIROC Subscribers on creating a strong grant application.

Quotables:

"When a community is evacuated, critical infrastructure preservation is such a key element of that community coming back as a re-entry plan. A healthcare facility is one of those key elements and preservation is essential." TP

"With the town of Banff and Banff Fire Department, this initiative is making their job that much easier. They know that we've taken care of things, they can go and protect other infrastructure." MH

"With innovation in healthcare, that's essentially how healthcare survives. Whether it's medicine in healthcare, or a really great set of sprinklers." TP

"We don't want to keep it all into that bottle box and hold it close to our hearts and say we've done it, no one else can do it. That's not us. We want to collaborate and spread the word on this system because it can be so effective in any community at all. Especially those who have healthcare centers, you don't want to lose that." – MH

Mentioned in this Episode:

· Covenant Health

· HIROC Safety Grants Program

· Banff Mineral Spring Hospital

· Town of Banff

· Wholesale Fire and Rescue

Access more interviews with healthcare leaders at HIROC.com/podcast

Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

Email us at [email protected].

HIROC's inaugural episode of Share Scale Repeat kicks off by spotlighting a topic all healthcare organizations have a keen eye on - how to action safety. Our guest Dr. Lucas Chartier from the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto taps into his physician and quality & safety expert lens to offer his perspective. We talk about learning from harm, creating purposeful safety projects, and the impact of a just reporting culture.

One of his key messaging includes the importance of sharing widely not only what has worked for your organization, but what hasn't worked, proving that our healthcare system is stronger when we share, scale, and repeat.

Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear about Dr. Chartier's go-to method for reducing stress, and three words he would use to describe his team. Trevor and Abi also chat more about HIROC's Safety Grants Program!

Quotables:

"I would really love to make myself irrelevant to the system and to society. If I could, of course, with the rest of my colleagues, make it so safe and so good in our departments and in our hospitals that we don't need to focus on quality and safety because it's so engrained in what everyone does, always, all the time, I would love that." LC

"Sometimes when we have an event or issues that happens to us or our system or our patients, we react and we think about how to change. And that's important of course. But it would be even better if we could do this ahead of time before harm or issues were to occur." LC

"We need to be vigilant, we need to have an open, just reporting culture. If people don't report these near misses, then there's no way we're going to know where the potential harm is and where we need to focus to be able to act before harm actually occurs." LC

"There's something about partnering with other organizations and feeling like you're solving bigger problems for more people, and I think there's a lot of fulfillment in doing that. And I think that people get a lot of personal satisfaction within their work which then drives them to do it even better and longer, which is really important these days in healthcare." LC

"If we figure out something here at UHN, why would we wait for somebody else elsewhere in Ontario or out of the country to figure out the exact same thing. If we can help them learn something, including things we did that didn't work well and that they shouldn't waste their time and resources doing, then why shouldn't we do it." LC

"You don't need to be an innovator, most of us probably don't have it inside of us and that's okay. You probably don't even need to be the early adopter. But please get out of the way, don't put up hurdles just for the sake of putting up hurdles because it's scary, because it's different, and because it could potentially fail." LC

"HIROC partners on safety innovations and applied work, where we really do work together hand-in-hand looking at how to create the safest healthcare systems. There's so much good that has been and done, which is amazing. And the most important piece about this is learning. Learning and sharing together. How do we share, scale and repeat." TH

Mentioned in this Episode:

· UHN

· HIROC Safety Grants Program

· HIROC's Healthcare Change Makers Podcast

Access more interviews with healthcare leaders at HIROC.com/podcast

Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

Email us at [email protected].

Even the smallest idea can spark big change. On Share Scale Repeat we talk through some tough topics in healthcare, interviewing the brains behind the projects that are keeping Canadians safe.