Improving patient safety and quality care for women and children: Advancing IWK Health as a Learning Health System

A Learning Health System (LHS) aims to incorporate data and evidence into policy decisions to improve health care quality and outcomes. The IWK Health Centre strives to be a leading LHS while providing care to women, children and families. However, there are opportunities to advance IWK Health as an LHS, and to improve the value and quality of care provided to people across the Canadian Maritimes. The proposed program of work will involve a collaboration with the Quality and Patient Safety department and IWK Nursing Council. A project exploring safe medication administration related adverse events will be used as a case study to understand how evidence informs policy and practice decision-making. A LHS approach will guide this work, while the knowledge to action (KTA) cycle will support the identification, adaptation, assessment and design of an intervention to address gaps in safe medication administration. Anticipated impacts of this work are: 1) improved patient safety and reduced medication errors; 2) enhanced understanding of how evidence and data inform practice and policy change across an entire health system (ie. IWK Health); 3) Improved ability for IWK Health to incorporate evidence into practice and function as an LHS.