Grant: Partnerships for Health System Improvement (PHSI)

Each year, injuries affect 700 million people worldwide including 2 million Canadians. In Canada, injuries are the leading cause of death among those under the age of 45 years and account for more premature deaths than heart disease, lung disease or HIV infection. The human and societal burden is even greater with many survivors being permanently impaired and never returning to school, work or their "regular" lives. Any Canadian can suffer an injury on any given day. Yet medical errors and substandard care threaten patient care. The quality of trauma care is a major public health concern and urgent action is needed to ensure quality and patient safety. Every injured Canadian should receive access to high-quality trauma care. Quality should not be determined by who we are, where we live or where we receive care. However, at present it is not possible to tell what the quality of trauma care is in Canada because it is not routinely measured or reported. But, efforts to improve care risk being ineffective unless they reflect what patients need and want. Patients and families want be involved in developing health care measures so that efforts to improve quality reflect what patients want. We plan to begin a major work to measure and improve the quality of trauma care delivered in Canada. We propose to do this by developing the first set of patient and family-centred measures of trauma care. First, we will run focus groups to learn from patients and families what aspects of trauma care are most important to them and what they consider to be "high quality trauma care." Second, we will present the lessons learned from our focus groups to a panel of trauma care experts to develop a quality measurement tool. Finally, we will pilot test our tool and use it to map the quality of trauma care across Canada to identify opportunities to improve the way trauma services are delivered to ensure that all injured Canadians receive high quality patient and family-centred care.