Sailing Too Close to the Wind? How Harnessing Patient Voice Can Identify Drift towards Boundaries of Acceptable Performance

Abstract

This opinion paper investigates how healthcare organizations identify and act upon different types of risk signals. These signals may generally be acknowledged, but we also often see with hindsight that they might not be because they have become a part of normal practice. Here, we detail how risk signals from patients and families should be acknowledged as system-level safety critical information and as a way of understanding and changing safety culture in healthcare. We discuss how healthcare organizations could work more proactively with patient experience data in identifying risks and improving system safety.

Keywords

• deviance
• drift
• safety boundaries
• patient voice