Patient’s View Miniseries Part I: BC Women’s Hospital

Welcome to the first installment of our four-part Patient’s View Miniseries!

So many exciting things are happening around the province with BCPSLS Patient’s View.  There are too many to fit them all into one blog post, so this fall we will feature a series of stories highlighting the innovative ways that Patient’s View is being piloted and adapted around BC.

Earlier this year, we shared how Langara nursing students were helping BC Women’s Hospital and BC Cancer Agency engage patients and families in identifying quality and safety issues using BCPSLS Patient’s View. Our first story in this miniseries will share how BC Women’s Hospital has continued on this journey.

Originating at BC Children’s Hospital, Patient’s View engages volunteers to invite patients and families at the bedside to share their concerns about the quality and safety of their care. This information is then entered into BCPSLS to facilitate analysis and sharing of the collected data.

BC Women’s began implementing Patient’s View in January 2017 after piloting the program the previous fall.

The volunteer model developed at BC Children’s was adopted through collaboration with the Langara College of Nursing. Like volunteers, students provide an effective way to engage patients and families without fear or repercussions due to reporting, and provide an outlet for them to share their stories.

Langara students Sylvia Tam and Michal Elenzano (above) were placed at BC Women’s this summer and felt the experience was invaluable to their nursing education. In addition to quality and safety principles, the students experienced what respectful bedside manner and patient-centred care look like.

“I learned that, as a nurse, it’s important to ask patients how they are doing and attend to psycho-social needs in addition to performing the tasks at hand,” says Michal. “If patients are tired, we keep the conversation short. If they want to share more, they can. We learned how important it is to involve the family, as well. Dads were particularly appreciative of the opportunity to get involved, as they can sometimes feel out of the loop in the perinatal setting.”

Debbie Johannesen, Director of Quality, Safety & Accreditation and Yvonne Law, Quality, Safety & Accreditation Leader at BC Women’s have led the expansion of Patient’s View to include antepartum units in addition to postpartum. They hope to eventually spread the program to the Fir Square Combined Care Unit, which is the first program in Canada to care for women who use substances and their newborns exposed to substances, within a single unit.

Sylvia notes that “Sometimes when patients share their stories they aren’t sure if it’s important information or not. This gives us an opportunity to validate their experiences. So much of the feedback is positive, but patients never comment on a great injection or other clinical task. They talk about respect, acknowledgement, and communication.”

Now that Patient’s View has been in place at BC Women’s for several months and a sufficient amount of feedback has been collected, summary reports have been shared with staff to enable learning across the organization.

Discussion is in progress about a long-term model that will address gaps that occur as a result of the students’ curriculum. For example, Patient’s View is not being implemented this fall as the students’ curriculum does not include placements during the fall term.

Debbie and Yvonne are also exploring ways that Patient’s View could be implemented more frequently. Until now, students were only able to interview patients and families two days per week. Ideally, interviews would happen every day so fewer patients are missed, as the length of stay is typically one to two days in the maternity setting.

As staff and leaders begin to receive reports from Patient’s View, Debbie and Yvonne look forward to conversations about how to take action on the data to improve patient safety at BC Women’s.

For more information, please contact Yvonne Law or Debbie Johannesen.