Sharing stories. Connecting people. Making healthcare safer.

A tribute to Doug Cochrane

We at BCPSLS Central Office are deeply saddened by the recent passing of our former leader and mentor, Dr. Doug Cochrane. As a champion of patient safety, Doug’s guidance and expertise helped shape the trajectory of patient safety incident reporting in BC. Doug...

Leveraging PSLS and accreditation to promote a patient safety culture at Providence Health Care

If you work in health care in BC, chances are good that your organization has recently undergone, or is currently preparing for, an accreditation survey. Since most surveys were postponed during the pandemic, health authorities have had a heavier survey schedule this...

Advancing cultural safety via the Patient Care Quality Program

When you think about safety in health care, what comes to mind? Some obvious things might be security, trust, or avoiding harm. It seems pretty straightforward, but let’s unpack that last word a bit: harm. What constitutes harm? Physical injury, of course. Or not...

Share your insights on the BC Patient Safety & Quality Council’s new strategic plan

The BC Patient Safety & Quality Council is renewing its strategic plan! They are currently reaching out to stakeholders to listen and learn about the needs and goals of BC's health care system to ensure their strategic direction continues to reflect what’s...

Province-wide initiative to improve care for newborns at risk of Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome

Eat. Sleep. Console. Three simple words that describe a patient-centred, culturally safe, and trauma-informed approach to improving care for newborns with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) and their families. According to Perinatal Services BC, the incidence rate of...

PSLS link is live in CST Cerner

Do you ever wish there really was an “easy button” you could push to solve whatever problem you were facing? Um…#yespleaseeveryday. Well, several thousand health care staff and clinicians in BC are now a tiny bit closer to that dream: CST Cerner users in Vancouver...

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Mission & Vision

Our mission is: To make health care safer for all British Columbians by fostering a culture of safety, shared learning and continuous system improvement.

Our vision is: Safe health care for BC: No needless harm.

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Who We Are

BC Patient Safety & Learning System (BCPSLS) is a web-based tool used by approximately 100,000 health care providers across BC to report and learn about patient safety events, near misses and hazards. BCPSLS has fostered improvements in patient safety and quality of care in all health care settings since its inception in 2008.

Today, we are focused on streamlining data collection and output, enhancing learning across our health care system and improving the quality of our modules and tools.

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What We Do

Over 400 safety event reports are submitted to BCPSLS each day from across the province. This data is allowing us to identify safety concerns and target quality and safety improvements where they’re needed most. To date, over one million safety event reports are in the BCPSLS database. Data summaries provide a rich basis for learning and improvement to over 10,000 healthcare leaders across BC.