Nominate a Patient Safety Champion

If you know a patient or caregiver who, through exemplary dedication and service, contributed to a project or initiative that improved patient safety outcomes, here is a good opportunity to recognize their work: HealthCareCAN and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) are partnering to present the 2017 Patient Safety Champion Awards, and there’s a special category for volunteers.

Last year, our patient partner Johanna Trimble was the recipient of the 2016 Patient Safety Champion Award in the volunteer category, in recognition of her commitment to changing the health care system by raising awareness around the over-medication of seniors. Now we’re looking forward to finding out who will win in 2017!

Visit the CPSI website to learn more about the awards and how to submit your nomination by April 1, 2017.

Updates from Our Oversight & Advisory Committee

The second PVN Oversight & Advisory Committee meeting of the year took place on February 23, with discussions about: the use of storytelling as a tool to affect positive change; our campaign “What Matters to You?” Day; the Patients as Partners Annual Dialogue; and our strategic plan and new materials.

Here are the meeting minutes if you’d like to learn more about what was discussed!

Evening Rounds: Health Decision Science

Much of health research seeks to improve health by focussing on the new – new treatments, new evidence etc. In contrast, health decision science seeks to improve health by improving the choices made with available evidence – recognizing uncertainty, complexity, competing values, tradeoffs and cognitive biases can frequently lead to decision errors.

Would you like to learn more about that and how to make better choices as a patient? In the next edition of Evening Rounds, Nick Bansback, an Assistant Professor at the School of Population and Public Health, and a Canadian Institutes for Health Research New Investigator, will take us through examples of how decision errors lead to poor choices in our daily lives, and translate these into areas where decision science has the potential to improve health. The event will take place on March 21 at the BCPSQC’s office in Vancouver. Learn more about it and register for free.

If you do not live in Vancouver, Evening Rounds will be streaming the event live on Periscope. Make sure to follow @EveningRounds on Twitter so that you can access the link once it goes online.