Grant: Project Grant

Healthcare inequity is a serious problem affecting many Canadian patients. Population sub- groups, such as ethnic minority groups and individuals with limited English ability, experience higher rates of hospital-based patient safety problems such as infections and medication errors, when compared to the wider population. Hospitals use a range of systems, such as incident reports and patient complaints, to track safety problems. However, these systems are not currently set up to identify how factors such as a patient's ethnicity, language, gender, or disability status might have contributed to preventable harms. If hospitals do not know about the ways in which such factors are influencing care provided, then they are not able to make improvements to address such inequities in care. While hospital leaders recognize the need to attend to equity related factors in their collection and use of patient safety data, there is limited research available to provide direction. The goals of the study are to: 1. Increase our knowledge of how to incorporate equity into two hospital monitoring systems by reviewing the literature and conducting interviews with patients/families, hospital workers, and leaders of innovations in this area; 2. Develop recommendations based on this knowledge and agreement among a group of experts; and 3. Survey hospital leaders across Canada to understand what hospitals are currently doing to integrate equity into hospital incident reporting and patient complaint systems and deliver improvement guidance to hospitals. This study will contribute to improvements in how Canadian hospitals collect and analyze data, and learn from and respond to these data to enable health equity for all.