What Shapes Safer Care? Seeing safety through the eyes of patients and families

Overview

What makes healthcare feel safe? The answer may look different depending on where you are standing.

While healthcare systems often understand patient safety through clinical outcomes, incidents, policies and processes, patients, families and communities can reveal other dimensions of safety—whether they feel heard and believed, understand what is happening, feel able to ask questions or raise concerns, and receive care that reflects their needs and circumstances.

For Canadian Patient Safety Week 2026, this session will explore how meaningful patient and public engagement can broaden our understanding of what shapes safer care. Through lived-experience perspectives, practical examples and facilitated discussion, participants will consider what becomes visible when patients and families are intentionally included in conversations about safety and how healthcare teams can move beyond gathering feedback toward creating the relationships, environments and opportunities that enable patients, families and communities to meaningfully influence safer care.

Learning Objectives

• • Recognize different dimensions of safety by considering how patients, families, healthcare providers and health systems may experience and understand safety differently.
• • Identify how meaningful patient and public engagement contributes to safer care, particularly by surfacing experiences, risks and barriers that may not otherwise be visible to healthcare teams.
• • Explore how psychological, cultural, emotional and relational safety influence people’s ability to speak up, ask questions and participate in healthcare decision-making.
• • Differentiate between collecting patient feedback and engaging patients and families in decisions that shape healthcare quality and safety.
• • Identify practical opportunities to involve patients, families and communities in shaping safer care within participants’ own teams, programs or organizations.