Dr. Lucas Chartier: Actioning Safety by Learning from Harm

HIROC’s inaugural episode of Share Scale Repeat kicks off by spotlighting a topic all healthcare organizations have a keen eye on - how to action safety. Our guest Dr. Lucas Chartier from the University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto taps into his physician and quality & safety expert lens to offer his perspective. We talk about learning from harm, creating purposeful safety projects, and the impact of a just reporting culture. 

One of his key messaging includes the importance of sharing widely not only what has worked for your organization, but what hasn’t worked, proving that our healthcare system is stronger when we share, scale, and repeat.

Stay tuned until the end of the episode to hear about Dr. Chartier’s go-to method for reducing stress, and three words he would use to describe his team. Trevor and Abi also chat more about HIROC’s Safety Grants Program!

Quotables:

“I would really love to make myself irrelevant to the system and to society. If I could, of course, with the rest of my colleagues, make it so safe and so good in our departments and in our hospitals that we don’t need to focus on quality and safety because it’s so engrained in what everyone does, always, all the time, I would love that.” LC

“Sometimes when we have an event or issues that happens to us or our system or our patients, we react and we think about how to change. And that’s important of course. But it would be even better if we could do this ahead of time before harm or issues were to occur.” LC

“We need to be vigilant, we need to have an open, just reporting culture. If people don’t report these near misses, then there’s no way we’re going to know where the potential harm is and where we need to focus to be able to act before harm actually occurs.” LC

“There’s something about partnering with other organizations and feeling like you’re solving bigger problems for more people, and I think there’s a lot of fulfillment in doing that. And I think that people get a lot of personal satisfaction within their work which then drives them to do it even better and longer, which is really important these days in healthcare.” LC

“If we figure out something here at UHN, why would we wait for somebody else elsewhere in Ontario or out of the country to figure out the exact same thing. If we can help them learn something, including things we did that didn’t work well and that they shouldn’t waste their time and resources doing, then why shouldn’t we do it.” LC

“You don’t need to be an innovator, most of us probably don’t have it inside of us and that’s okay. You probably don’t even need to be the early adopter. But please get out of the way, don’t put up hurdles just for the sake of putting up hurdles because it’s scary, because it’s different, and because it could potentially fail.” LC

“HIROC partners on safety innovations and applied work, where we really do work together hand-in-hand looking at how to create the safest healthcare systems. There's so much good that has been and done, which is amazing. And the most important piece about this is learning. Learning and sharing together. How do we share, scale and repeat.” TH

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

·       UHN

·       HIROC Safety Grants Program

·       HIROC’s Healthcare Change Makers Podcast

Access more interviews with healthcare leaders at HIROC.com/podcast

Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your favourite podcasts.

Email us at [email protected].