Patient Safety Specialist

**Position Profile**:
The Patient Safety Department provides leadership for the planning, implementation and evaluation of patient safety across all sites in the Network. The principal functional areas include: leading the organizational response to past harm, building a culture of safety and learning, safety anticipation and preparedness, focus on reliability to prevent harm and sensitivity to operations to ensure care is safe every day.

The Patient Safety Specialist is recognized as an organizational expert in patient safety. The primary function of the Specialist is to collaborate with senior leadership, clinical and administrative leaders, frontline staff, physicians, and patients and families to improve the safety of care provided in the organization.

The Specialist is responsible for enabling clinical teams to measurably improve patient safety and the prevention of harm. This requires the implementation of reliable systems, infrastructure and practices while motivating cultural change to enable the presence of safety in all the organization’s activity.

**Main Responsibilities**:

- Support the Patient Safety program & strategy in alignment with Unity Health Toronto’s vision of Creating the Best Care Experiences
- Participate in the annual patient safety program goal setting and priority work planning
- Manage the corporate patient safety event reporting system including ongoing evaluation and improvement of the system to ensure meaningful use
- Facilitate and support the serious safety event process including tracking of improvement actions until completion and ensuring documentation of all reviews in a central repository
- Provide consultative expertise in patient safety science, analysis and improvement methods including;
- Systems theory
- Human factors
- Root cause analysis, multi-incident analysis
- Failure mode affect analysis
- Lean methodology
- Event trending & analysis
- Knowledge of legislative requirements of Excellent Care for All Act and specifics around reporting of “critical incidents” definition per Public Hospitals Act
- Support corporate improvement activities identified from patient safety event trends or event reviews
- Support evaluation and action planning aimed at improving organizational patient safety culture
- Participate in annual gap analysis and create action plans to maintain organizational compliance Accreditation Canada patient safety ROPs
- Collaborate with other departments as required to develop sustainable processes for audit and feedback and other evaluation methods (e.g. integration of data collection into clinical practice, interpretation of results, generation of reports etc.)

**Qualifications**:

- Demonstrated leadership qualities;
- Demonstrated success in collaborating with others to establish, lead and maintain positive change;
- Undergraduate degree in relevant health related field; Master’s degree preferred;
- Registered member of a recognized health profession college or regulatory body preferred;
- Completion of the Canadian Patient Safety Officer Course preferred;
- Minimum 3 years’ patient safety improvement experience in a clinical environment;
- Experience with key patient safety principles including incident analysis, FMEA, human factors, etc.;
- Strong project management skills;
- Ability to deal with multiple complex issues and manage multiple priorities;
- Self-directed and strong collaborative skills;
- Patient/family centred focus;
- Experience in coaching, mentoring and developing others;
- Experience preparing manuscripts for peer-review an asset;
- Experience with MS Office required.#LI-MR1