The Alberta Children’s Hospital (ACH) and the Stollery Children’s Hospital have joined the Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS) Network, a network of children’s hospitals across North America that are working together to eliminate serious harm across all children’s hospitals. AHS is committed to advancing safe and high-quality care for children, as well as providing a safe working environment for staff.

About the Initiative

The SPS Network is built on the fundamental belief that by sharing successes and failures transparently and learning from one another, children’s hospitals can achieve their goals more effectively and quickly than working alone.

The goal of joining the SPS Network is to transform the safety and quality of care delivered in our hospitals by eliminating preventable harm to patients. By participating in this initiative we expect to:

• reduce seven-day readmissions
• reduce serious safety events
• reduce hospital-acquired conditions
• reduce staff days missed due to injury

Our Goals

To create a universally safe and healing environment for all children who are in our care by:

• Embracing a culture of safety and putting patients and families first
• Introducing evidence-based practices as shown to reduce the number of harm events
• Promoting transparency by reporting monthly outcomes
• Ongoing education for both clinical and non-clinical staff and physicians
• Implementing best practices for a safe work environment
• Involving families as part of the safety team
• Developing an operational and quality dashboard on the Safest Together initiative to facilitate continued quality

Benefits to Patients, Family Members & Health Professionals

Benefits include:

• Decreased incidence of hospital acquired conditions and serious safety events
• Improvement in safety outcomes across the ACH and Stollery with evidence-based practices
• Improvement in patient and family experiences and family satisfaction with the quality of the care we provide
• Opportunities to collaborate and learn together as part of the SPS network, and contribute to a larger body of knowledge across North America
• Build trust through transparency and disclosure
• Enhance the patient and family experience through education and partnership in the care team
• Safer working environment for staff and physicians