Consumers Advancing Patient Safety (CAPS) is a consumer-led nonprofit organization formed to be a collective voice for individuals, families and healers who wish to prevent harm in healthcare encounters through partnership and collaboration. CAPS is committed to exploring and contributing the wisdom and experience that consumers can offer to patient safety research, education of both consumers and providers, reporting of bad outcomes and near misses, development and implementation of solutions that can prevent harm, and policy making that will help create healthcare systems that are safe, compassionate and just. 

p4ps secured the grant funding to establish CAPS in 2003 and continues to actively assist in building CAPS.

• Read an article on the CAPS Mission, Vision and Goals

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The World Health Organization’s World Alliance for Patient Safety represents a major opportunity to put the patient and the consumer at the center of the international movement to improve patient safety.  Patients for Patient Safety (PFPS), one of ten action areas of the World Alliance, is designed to ensure that the perspective of patients and families, consumers and citizens – whichever term resonates best - is a central reference point in shaping this important work.

p4ps leadership serves on the Steering Group of PFPS and contributes to developing its global network through facilitation of regional workshops.

• Read the PFPS Statement of Case

• Read an article about PFPS formational workshop 

Martin Hatlie also serves as an ex officio participant in the World Alliance’s efforts to develop an International Patient Safety Event Classification,  which aims to define, harmonize and group patient safety concepts into an internationally agreed classification. This will help elicit, capture and analyze factors relevant to patient safety in a manner conducive to learning and system improvement.

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The Patient Safety Education Project (PSEP) combines two high-quality models to advance a national and international patient safety education-dissemination agenda.  First, the U.S. developed a high-impact, conference-based education dissemination project. Using a curriculum driven, train-the-trainer approach grounded in adult learning theory and embedded into social structures to facilitate behavior change, the model has been evaluated and found to be unprecedented successful. This model will be used for dissemination. This model has been used successfully for the Education in Palliative and End-of-life Care (EPEC) Project.  

Second, Australia created a national consensus framework for patient safety from which diverse groups could create teaching materials for all levels of health care workers. This framework will be used as a starting point to define core patient safety content. In addition, PSEP collaborates with many patient safety groups throughout the United States, Australia, and beyond, and rather than recreate them, will draw on their excellent contributed materials whenever possible to create a consensus-based Core Safety Curriculum. This Core Safety Curriculum will drive the dissemination of patient safety practices.

p4ps is a partner in the development of PSEP.

• Watch a PSEP Trigger Tape

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Parents of Infants and Children with Kernicterus (PICK) was developed in 2000 by a group of mothers of children with severe cerebral palsy resulting from kernicterus, a condition caused by excessive bilirubin levels in newborns. PICK promotes awareness, prevention and treatment of kernicterus.  The organization’s success is due to a unique operational model that emphasizes active partnerships with healthcare institutions and agencies as a means of achieving change. 

p4ps assisted PICK in developing a video that tells PICK’s story of collaboration, and continues to be active in building the organization.

• Watch the PICK Educational Video

• Read an article about PICK’s consumer education campaign

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Patient Safety Advantage (PSA) programs and services combine expertise from a variety of backgrounds including medicine, nursing, executive leadership, hospital administration, organizational development, employee communications, public health, law and marketing. Members of the team share a commitment to helping organizations foster cultures of safety and high reliability, which boosts their reputation for patient safety leadership in the marketplace.

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Chicago-based filmmaker, Four Leaf Enterprises, Inc., produced Things You Should Know Before Entering the Hospital, after a principal of that organization contracted a serious staph infection in a physician’s office. His experience prompted Four Leaf Enterprises to locate other patients who had experienced medical error and capture their perspectives and error prevention advice.

p4ps published A facilitator’s guide for healthcare providers to using the consumer education film ‘Things You Should Know Before Entering the Hospital’. The facilitator’s guide is designed for use in education sessions with healthcare students and workers, a secondary audience for the film.

• Download the Facilitator’s Guide

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