About this Research Topic

Background

In 2002, Charles Vincent and his colleague Angela Coulter published a commentary, entitled ‘Patient safety: what about the patient?’. At the time of publication, this question seemed somewhat radical. The authors’ central premise was that patient safety improvement plans neglected the patient’s perspective. They argued that the active role of patients and families to support their safety, and the safety of care more generally, needed to be recognized. They posited that engaging with patients and families could support better diagnostic processes, treatment decisions, and management. Further, the authors suggested that patients and families could help services identify safety incidents, but importantly – and perhaps presciently – underlined the need to engage in an open and supportive dialogue with those affected by such incidents and “give an honest and open explanation and an apology, ask about emotional trauma and anxieties about future treatment, and provide practical and financial help quickly”. This may have been written 21 years ago, but it remains as true today as it was then.

In many societies across the globe, reaching the age of 21 is seen as a precious milestone, a coming of age and passage into maturity. As we reach the 21st year since the publication of Vincent and Coulter’s seminal paper, a legitimate question to ask is: has the theory and practice of engaging patients and families in quality and safety initiatives, come of age? Or is it more a case of arrested development? It is true that many of the potential roles for patients and families suggested by Vincent and Coulter have been the focus of theory development and empirical study, patient safety policies, and service improvement. We clearly know much more as an academic and healthcare community about the potential role for patients and families in supporting patient safety, but evidence of how such a role can be implemented and sustained, as well as its positive impact on safety outcomes, remains equivocal.

Much of the drive for the engagement and involvement of patients and families in supporting quality and patient safety, has – perhaps unsurprisingly – come from outside academic and policy circles. In the UK, it has been families coming together that have driven the establishment of independent inquiries following safety concerns across a number of hospital services, a situation replicated across high-profile healthcare failures globally. Put simply, patients and families are, like never before, asking that healthcare services deliver on proclamations of ‘nothing about me, without me’.

In the context of healthcare services globally recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, with the squeezing of resources and increasing demand, we arguably need ‘all hands on deck’ to support the safety of healthcare services. This Research Topic is launched to coincide with World Patient Safety Day, which this year is ‘Engaging Patients for Patient Safety’ in “recognition of the crucial role patients, families and caregivers play in the safety of healthcare”.

We would welcome submissions that support a collective sense-making on the past, present and future of patient and family involvement and engagement in quality and safety. Our hope for this Research Topic is to bring together a body of work that supports a global discussion about how health services might move from an evidently moral obligation for engaging patients and families in quality and safety, to a workable, sustainable system embedded in the current realities of care delivery.

This collection welcomes commentary submissions, scoping and systematic reviews, and in particular, empirical work presenting quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods research. Submissions led or co-authored by citizen-patients are especially welcomed.

Some example topics include:
• Guidance for, or descriptions of how patients and families can be actively and productively engaged in safety initiatives at the macro, meso, micro, and individual levels;
• Evaluation of patient and family engagement initiatives;
• Studies reporting initiatives to support patients and families providing healthcare in their own homes;
• Reviews exploring the current understanding of patient and family engagement;
• Studies using safety science or human approaches to examine patient and family engagement in patient safety;
• Studies exploring the experiences of patients and families in the processes that follow safety incidents (investigations, coronial processes, litigation), and the potential for new approaches;
• Studies exploring how to educate and train the next generation of clinicians and healthcare staff to partner with patients and families to advance safety;
• Patient safety studies involving patients as researchers or educators.

Keywords: World Patient Safety Day, Patient Safety, Family Engagement

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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