Engaging patients and families is an essential part of identifying and preventing patient safety events. This study found that an educational intervention providing patients and families with the skills necessary to audit four safe practices (patient identification, hand hygiene, blood or chemotherapy identification, and related side effects) can provide healthcare organizations with valuable quality and safety information.

Efforts to engage patients and family in patient safety are nearly universal.This study explored whether patients and relatives have differing willingness to challenge healthcare professions about patient safety. Using a pre-post design, the authors examined whether a training program (including a brief video, brochure and questionnaire) impacted the patient or family members’ ‘willingness to challenge’ healthcare workers. The researchers found that patients and family members had similar willingness to challenge, and willingness was high for all safe practices analyzed except for hand hygiene.