Patient safety stories are stories in both video and narrative formats whereby the experience of both patient/service users and staff who have been involved or impacted by patient safety incidents are told as a story from their own perspective.
Purpose
Stories are designed to give a voice to a person’s own experience. Storytelling relating to patient safety has been shown to be effective in creating conversation and reflection to help those who are listening to or reading the story to increase their awareness of a safety issue and help them understand the viewpoint of others. Both patient/service users and staff stories will be developed to help others understand the impact and importance of patient safety from the perspectives of those that use or work in our health services.
Stories can either relate to when things go wrong or to positive experiences in our health services, and all are worthy of sharing in the interest of learning. Each story represents a personal story and the story format facilitates and supports the storyteller in expressing their personal account of what happened and how it impacted them.
Patient safety stories will be made available for education and training purposes in HSE and HSE-funded services to highlight how we can all contribute positively to patient safety.
How will Patient Safety Stories support improvement?
Patient Safety Stories support learning, sharing and improving for patient safety.
- Learning: Learning from the experience of others helps to shape, strengthen or challenge our opinions and values as they enable us to see how patient safety issues can impact others.
- Sharing: All stories are available via Patient Safety Together: learning, sharing and improving.
- Improving: Storytelling is a recognised and accepted way to gather patient/service user and staff experiences in order to show where risks and patient safety issues exist, how they impact those involved and thereby encourage our services to make improvements.
Where can I get more information on Patient Safety Stories?
Please contact the Patient Safety Together Learning Team at patientsafetytogether@hse.ie for further information
More information
A full description of the process of how this toolkit provides step by step guide on the creation of patient /service user and staff stories can be accessed via the toolkit for developing stories (PDF, 31 pages, 1 MB).