Tuesday 10 March 2026 | 13:30-14:30
Stream: N/A
Session format: World Café 

Table 1 - Reimagining the culture of safety: aligning physical safety with emotional safety for paediatric patients and families

On the journey toward becoming a high reliability organization, hospitals often prioritize physical safety while overlooking emotional safety as a standard practice. This workshop introduces tools and interactive learning experiences to define emotional safety in paediatrics, integrate simulation-based training, and apply an emotional harm rating scale within existing safety event frameworks. Emotional safety is the intentional, interdisciplinary effort to foster resilience, healing, and trust in paediatric care (www.emotional-safety.org). Participants will explore emotional safety data from one institution, presented through control charts, Pareto charts, and scatter plots to highlight progress toward strategic goals. These visuals demonstrate how data-driven decisions can link emotional and physical harm classifications to improve overall safety culture. The emotional harm scale, tailored for paediatrics, provides a model that may be adapted for adult care environments, offering a scalable approach to holistic safety. This session equips participants to embed emotional safety into quality improvement and organizational high reliability initiatives.

Barbara Romito Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital; USA
Sarah Patterson McMaster University; Canada

Table 2 - Co-designing safer emergency care: addressing language barriers for families with limited English proficiency

Language barriers represent a critical but often overlooked patient safety concern. In paediatrics, and especially in acute scenarios where time is short and communication is vital, families with limited proficiency in the language of care face disproportionate harm. In this session, we share findings from a UK-based co-design project using rapid-ethnography, interviews, and workshops to develop an intervention.

Ricky Odedra Imperial College London; UK

Table 3 - From blame to insight: how learning teams drive improvement after adverse events in healthcare

In complex healthcare systems, traditional root cause analyses often fall short. At Bernhoven Hospital, we replaced conventional incident investigations with “learning teams” – multidisciplinary conversations focusing on how work is done in reality. This approach shifts the emphasis from blame to learning and fosters a restorative culture. In this session, we share our experiences with learning teams in the aftermath of serious incidents, including how they helped us better understand everyday work processes, improve collaboration, and develop practical improvements. Delegates will gain insight into how learning teams restore trust, promote psychological safety, and lead to tangible quality improvements. We will share real-world cases, the process of facilitation, and the reflections from participants, including how this method complements and strengthens structured incident reporting to the regulator. We also will share our experience and how we learned from and dealt with failures that came up in the evolution of this method.

Caroline Heijckmann Bernhoven; Netherlands
Iris Venema Bernhoven; Netherlands

Table 4 - Being human: a framework for safety culture within health and social care in Northern Ireland

This session is co-presented by the project lead and an Expert by Experience / Lived Experience.

Setting out the background, context and antecedent to this work, it describes the delivery of a co-production model to develop a framework to drive improvements in and facilitate assessment of Safety Culture within HSC. 

Delegates will learn about a definition of Safety Culture as one that is safe and compassionate (for patients and staff), just and open, and continually learning and improving.

 Delegates will further their understanding of utilising co-production to develop a Framework for Safety Culture within Health and Social Care that is bespoke to their region / nation.

Delegates will learn how a Framework, by setting out clear expectations and indicators of what good looks like, may be used to drive improvements and facilitate assessment of Safety Culture.

Leanne Morgan RQIA; Northern Ireland

Table 5 - Patient and family (consumer) knowledge and confidence to report patient deterioration through the Consumer-Initiated-Escalation-of-Care (CIEoC) policy utilised across two hospitals

This presentation is aimed at a wide audience interested in early detection of patient deterioration in hospitals. Results of phase 1 of a doctoral project that explores patient and family (consumer) knowledge and confidence to report acute patient deterioration in hospitals will be reported.

Timely response to clinical deterioration can lead to better patient outcomes, improved patient safety and risk minimisation in hospitals. The role of consumers in reporting patient deterioration has been recognised and CIEoC protocols developed to enable consumer participation across Australian hospitals.

Despite widely accepted recognition of the consumer’s role in reporting deterioration, the rates of consumer participation remain low. Consumers may experience issues in reporting clinical deterioration.

Focus is placed on both general and potentially vulnerable consumer groups including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI), people with disabilities and people from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds who may experience unique difficulties in navigating CIEoC pathways.

Stanislav Minyaev The College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University; Australia