Evaluating the Involvement of Patient and Family Advisors in Quality and Safety Teams in Nova Scotia

In the Nova Scotia Health Authority, Patient and Family Advisors have been engaged as members of Primary Health Care Quality and Safety Teams that assess, evaluate, and recommend changes to health service offered in communities. While some step has been taken to evaluate the processes involved with this change, more evaluation is needed to understand how well Patient and Family Advisors have been integrated into these teams and what the impact of their involvement has been. The goal of this project is to understand how best to involve Patient and Family Advisors so that patients have a stronger voice and meaningful impact on the primary health care system in Nova Scotia. To do this our team will do focus group interviews with Primary Health Care Quality and Safety Teams, and Patient and Family Advisors. We will also do focus group interviews with clinicians such as family doctors, nurse practitioners, family practice nurses and others who work in teams in community settings such as family practice clinics or offices and diabetes care centers. Our research team is unique because it includes patient researchers as well as researchers from Dalhousie University and the Nova Scotia Health Authority. This project provides an opportunity to strengthen the long-term integration of patient engagement approaches in Nova Scotia by disseminating what we learn about connecting and measuring the success of quality improvement processes with patient engagement to other parts of the health care system.