Sharing stories. Connecting people. Making healthcare safer.

Change Day BC!

What drew you to healthcare? What ignites your passion? What step – big or small – could you take to make our system better for our patients and their families? Change Day BC is building on the successful global movement ignited by the National Health Service...

Interior Health: Engaging physicians in quality and safety (Part 2)

Physician engagement and leadership are essential to the pursuit of safe high-quality patient care. But often the challenge for healthcare organizations is understanding what strategies will work best to strengthen physicians' commitment to quality and safety...

Life-threatening near miss: Sharing lessons learned with BC care providers

A “near miss” (good catch/close call) is an opportunity to learn from what happened and make improvements to quality of care and patient safety across our healthcare system. The following case highlights the value of near miss reporting in BC PSLS and the importance...

ReAct: Protecting vulnerable adults from harm

Every day, there’s a vulnerable adult living in BC who suffers from abuse, neglect or self-neglect. The Adult Guardianship Act (Act) was enacted in February 2000 – with recent updates and changes that came into force on December 1, 2014 – to give designated agencies...

BC PSLS blog turns two!

Time sure flies…another year has passed and it’s time to celebrate our 2nd birthday! The BC PSLS blog has now reached nearly 40,000 visitors, which is three times last year’s numbers...wow! At the top of the list for Canadian visitors are BC, Ontario and...

Talking about blood! (Part 2)

In our first article about Transfusion Medicine (TM) safety we introduced the Transfusion Error Surveillance System, or “TESS," a national initiative led by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), and we described Island Health’s significant contribution to this...

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Mission & Vision

Our mission is: To make health care safer for all British Columbians by fostering a culture of safety, shared learning and continuous system improvement.

Our vision is: Safe health care for BC: No needless harm.

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Who We Are

BC Patient Safety & Learning System (BCPSLS) is a web-based tool used by approximately 100,000 health care providers across BC to report and learn about patient safety events, near misses and hazards. BCPSLS has fostered improvements in patient safety and quality of care in all health care settings since its inception in 2008.

Today, we are focused on streamlining data collection and output, enhancing learning across our health care system and improving the quality of our modules and tools.

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What We Do

Over 400 safety event reports are submitted to BCPSLS each day from across the province. This data is allowing us to identify safety concerns and target quality and safety improvements where they’re needed most. To date, over one million safety event reports are in the BCPSLS database. Data summaries provide a rich basis for learning and improvement to over 10,000 healthcare leaders across BC.