RUH to track data on injuries
Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital (RUH) is the first in Saskatchewan to join the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program, an injury and poisoning surveillance system involving 18 hospitals across Canada.
Patients who go to RUH with injuries will be asked what they were doing when it happened, what went wrong and where the injury occurred. The information will become part of a federal database used to prevent injuries, influencing things like product regulation and building codes.
Dr. Bruce Cload, director of the program, said it will also provide Saskatchewan-specific benefits.
“We have access to that database to look at our local data and we can use it to look at our own injury patterns and see if we have initiatives that we can undertake locally.”
The process to have RUH join the program started in 2015 when the federal government decided to expand it. Over the last two years, staff have been working to create a system for sending Saskatchewan patient data to the national database in a confidential and secure way. The overall goal is improvements in practice based on accurate data, Cload said.
“That information may help other people in the same circumstances, or injured in the same way, to try and prevent that injury in the future.”
He said the program is currently capturing information from 100 to 300 of the roughly 750 people who come to RUH with injuries monthly. His team’s goal is to increase that to 50 per cent in the next six months and to 80 per cent of injuries in the next year.
Shelly McFadden, director of prevention for the Workers Compensation Board, said the introduction of the program at RUH is a positive for the province because it can be difficult to collect data on injuries that occur off the job.
Using data about injuries in the community, the WCB is better able to align its injury prevention awareness campaigns, like Mission Zero, with what happens in the workplace, she said.
“When we go home from work, we’ve got maybe kids or grandkids or nieces or nephews, so we need to be safe both at home and at work,” she said. “I think from a WCB perspective ... it’s our mandate to focus on workplace, but it’s so important for people to also have that awareness, that what they’re doing at work can affect their lives at home and vice versa.”
Cload said RUH front-line staff, volunteers and his team have all played a role in making membership in the program possible.