Sharing stories. Connecting people. Making healthcare safer.

Perioperative safety counts!

Hundreds of surgical procedures are performed every day in BC. To help keep patients safe, perioperative nurses perform a “surgical count” in the Operating Room (OR) to prevent the retention of foreign objects such as sponges, sharps and surgical instruments....

“Falls prevention is for everybody” says BC Cancer Agency president and staff

Every patient walking through the doors at BC Cancer Agency (BCCA) is dealing with some form of cancer. A disease that impacts the lives of far too many people in British Columbia every day. While it might seem odd to associate falls prevention with cancer treatment,...

Improvements at BC PSLS!

It’s been a work in progress for several months, so we're excited to announce that BC PSLS was recently upgraded to offer several new features for users across the province. These developments are part of our overall commitment to BC’s healthcare providers, ensuring...

New falls prevention “Toolkit” earns high praise for VCH (part 2)

Earlier this year we introduced the Vancouver Acute (VA) Falls Prevention Team and their new Falls Prevention Toolkit at Vancouver General Hospital (VGH). At that time, the team was just beginning to rollout the Toolkit to the medical, surgical, cardiac and...

Spotlight on Biomedical Engineering and Fraser Health Biomed team

In 2010, Lower Mainland Biomedical Engineering (LMBME) became a single entity as part of Lower Mainland Consolidation (LMC); an initiative which consolidated many healthcare services in order to share resources and optimize patient care. With that change came a new...

Fixing lab specimen errors: A cross-department initiative at Royal Columbian Hospital

Mislabelled lab specimens have the potential to cause patient harm, especially patients in critical care who need accurate and frequent blood work throughout their stay in hospital. ...

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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.