# Sailing Too Close to the Wind? How Harnessing Patient Voice Can Identify Drift towards Boundaries of Acceptable Performance

## TL;DR

This paper explores how patient feedback can help healthcare organizations identify and address safety risks that may otherwise go unnoticed.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel perspective on using patient voice as a critical source for identifying and addressing safety risks in healthcare systems.

## Key findings

- Patient and family feedback can reveal safety risks that become normalized over time.
- Healthcare organizations should proactively use patient experience data to improve system safety.
- Risk signals from patients are essential for understanding and changing safety culture.

## Abstract

This opinion paper investigates how healthcare organizations identify and act upon different types of risk signals. These signals may generally be acknowledged, but we also often see with hindsight that they might not be because they have become a part of normal practice. Here, we detail how risk signals from patients and families should be acknowledged as system-level safety critical information and as a way of understanding and changing safety culture in healthcare. We discuss how healthcare organizations could work more proactively with patient experience data in identifying risks and improving system safety.