Patient and family engagement in patient safety practices: A Making Healthcare Safer rapid response review

Patient and family engagement (PFE) is a developing area in reducing patient harm. This review addresses two questions: 1) What PFE patient safety practices (PSPs) have been used to prevent, report, or mitigate harms to patients and in what settings have they been used? 2) What evidence of effectiveness and unintended effects of PFE PSPs has been published since the Making Healthcare Safer (MHS) III report? We searched PubMed and the Cochrane Library for studies published between January 2019 and April 2023. We included reviews of and primary studies on safety, quality, or utilization outcomes associated with any intervention focused on PFE in reporting and/or reducing patient safety events and harms. We retrieved 768 citations and found one systematic review and five studies meeting the inclusion criteria. The studies were either multi-component patient fall interventions or patient portals and information tools. Patient fall intervention PFE PSPs demonstrated significant decreases in overall rate of fall (15%–71% reductions) and fall with injury (34%–67% reductions) across three studies and a 17% decrease in the hospital length of stay in one study. Across three studies employing portals and information tools, PFE PSPs facilitated the identification of errors and significantly decreased the hospital length of stay and readmissions. Research on PFE PSPs provides emerging evidence of the effectiveness of including PFE as a component of interventions targeting specific preventable harms. More research is needed to support the measurement of and better determine the overall effectiveness of a broader implementation of PFE PSPs.