Sharing stories. Connecting people. Making healthcare safer.

Talking about blood…not sweat and tears!

Transfusions of blood and blood products are an important part of healthcare. When adverse events related to transfusions occur, the impact on patients can be considerable with negative outcomes such as ABO blood group incompatibility, delays in care, inappropriate...

Seniors safety: Bradley Centre’s mission to prevent harm due to falls

Patient “falls” are the most frequently reported patient safety event in BC PSLS, accounting for nearly 40% of all events reported in our provincial database. Falls can lead to loss of mobility, serious injury or even death, which is why many healthcare facilities...

Home Support Workers Promote Safety and Quality on the Sunshine Coast

At a time when incident reporting systems have become increasingly paramount to improving healthcare safety, a group of home support staff on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast have risen to the top to overcome some interesting challenges with reporting patient safety...

From stacks to renos! A successful campaign for medication safety

Development of the new Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre (ARHCC) has led to an increase in the number of patients coming to the facility for chemotherapy treatment. Storage space for cancer medications was starting to become inadequate and a serious...

Goodbye, black holes! Hello, bubbles!

By Guest Blogger: Darren Frizzell How can we use BC PSLS data to drive organizational change and help healthcare providers who may be drowning in mountains of work? This is my focus and the main question I have been striving to answer during my time with BC PSLS...

Island Health introduces “Insulin Safety Initiative” for patients and staff

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices Canada considers insulin as one of the Top 5 “high alert” medications due to its narrow therapeutic index and its frequency of use. When used in error, insulin has an increased risk of causing significant patient harm – “too...

« Older Entries

Next Entries »



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.



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.



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.