The Patient's Role in Safety

Planting Seeds for Safety

Involving patients in safety is a concept that takes time to grow, must be fertilized, watered and met with warmth, just as seeds in a garden in order to bloom. This gets to the heart of an orgization's culture, and as such, thoughtful and careful seed planting must occur. AzHHA's Safe & Sound Patient Safety Initiative recognizes this and in response developed the "Forget Me Not - involving your patients in safety" seed packet program.

A colorful Forget Me Not seed packet has been developed for each month of the year. The “seeds” in each packet is actually an insert card that has a written suggestion about a specific role of the patient/family in safety. The insert card also targets cultural issues within an organization so staff can move towards an accepting and nurturing role with patient and family involvement. Twelve topics have been identified with one being featured every month. Topics for the insert cards include:

  • The patient’s role in medication usage and medical information.
  • Possible roles for patients /families to serve on hospital committees.
  • "Listening" to patients/families.

This is a one year program that will continue throughout 2008. Program highlights include:

  • Every quarter a bundle of three seed packets will be sent to the hospital contact person. In most cases the contact person will be the Patient Safety Officer or Quality Director.
  • Representing three months of ideas and bundled together, hospitals have a choice of three different ideas to consider implementing. We realize that some ideas will fit the organization’s culture, state of readiness and resources, and some will not. That is why we built the element of “choice” into the initiative.
  • The first Forget Me Not seed packet mailing was in January, 2008.

Coming Spring 2008: check back for an online order form to purchase additional seed packets for your organization!

Forget Me Not Seeds for Safety