Healthcare Areas

In a survey conducted in 2019, the HQCA asked residents living in designated supportive living:

Do you feel safe here?

Residents could choose “Yes, always / Yes, sometimes / No, hardly ever / No, never”

Safety can be one of the reasons an individual becomes a resident at a care site and families often feel a site can offer greater safety for their loved one than living on their own.

However, residents should also feel safe while living in a designated supportive living site. Abusive behaviour by staff or other residents, unknown visitors, and the physical environment are just a few examples of potential safety issues.

There are a number of factors providers and leaders can consider to better understand and improve the safety of the resident. Some questions they could ask before taking action include:

• • What characteristics of their care or environment are residents thinking about when answering this question?
  • Are residents comfortable sharing concerns? If not, how might this impact their safety?
  • How is safety addressed in staff orientation? How can a site help staff understand and make their important role in resident safety a priority?
  • What can leadership, specifically those leaders who might not be consistently visible to front line staff, do to demonstrate their commitment to resident safety?
  • How can resident safety be maintained or improved as sites:
    – Create more home-like environments for their residents?
  • – Reduce or eliminate the use of restraints?
  • – Reduce the inappropriate use of medications (e.g., antipsychotics)?
  • – Increase resident choice and independence?
  • Who should be involved in discussions to improve these results? How could residents and/or family members be engaged to develop solutions? What other collaboration might be required to make improvements in this area?

For information about the HQCA’s designated supportive living resident experience survey, please visit the HQCA website.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess supported living’s performance in these dimensions of quality: Acceptability and Safety.

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