Sharing stories. Connecting people. Making healthcare safer.

Everything you need to know about medical device incident reporting for Vanessa’s Law

Infusion pumps. Orthopedic implants. Defibrillators. CT scanners. Syringes. Devices are an invaluable part of our health care system. They save lives, relieve suffering, and enable us to provide care for patients every day. But what happens when they don’t work the...

Learning from no-harm incidents

You may have heard that PSLS receives over 400 incident reports each day from health care providers across the province. When this statistic is shared, we often clarify that the majority of these incidents do not result in patient harm. Whew! That’s good news. But...

Introducing our 2019-2023 strategic directions

What’s the plan? We tend to ask this question a lot. What’s the plan for today’s meeting? What’s the plan for lunch? It’s often pretty easy to answer. Sometimes it’s not so simple, though. What’s the plan for next five years? What will our organization focus on, what...

Guest blog: High incidence of over-infusions supports need for Vanessa’s Law

By guest blogger Brendan Gribbons, Regional Engineering Team Manager, Lower Mainland Biomedical Engineering (LMBME) Over-infusions Lower Mainland Biomedical Engineering (LMBME) and Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) recently investigated a concerning incidence of...

Vanessa’s Law and mandatory reporting of serious adverse drug reactions and medical device incidents

Have you heard of Vanessa’s Law? Officially known as the Protecting Canadians from Unsafe Drugs Act, Vanessa’s Law is named after Vanessa Young, a fifteen-year-old girl who died of a cardiac arrhythmia after being prescribed Prepulsid® (cisapride) for a stomach...

Putting patient safety first during CST Go Live

Ah, change. We #lovehate it, don’t we? It can be refreshing, energizing, and full of promise. It can also be stressful, challenging, and uncertain. And no one knows this better than the many dedicated staff who have been involved with implementing Clinical &...

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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.