Enhancing safety and care quality for culturally and linguistically diverse cancer consumers: A consumer engagement approach

Patient safety is a critical concern in cancer services. Patient engagement is central to high quality cancer service delivery and recognised internationally as a way to protect patients from harm. Many practices have been developed to enhance patient engagement specifically in relation to their safety, which include questioning, challenging health professionals and encouraging patient reports of errors in their care. Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) consumers are particularly vulnerable to unsafe care, but the currently available patient engagement practices to enhance safety are not appropriate for CALD consumers. No engagement practices have been developed to date specifically for (and with) CALD consumers to enhance their safety. The proposed project aims to enhance the safety of cancer care for CALD consumers through developing, for the first time, engagement practices to enhance patient safety in New South Wales (NSW) and Victorian (VIC) cancer inpatient, outpatient and day procedure services. This mixed methods project synthesises observational, interview and documentary data to gain an in-depth understanding of CALD consumers’ use of cancer services and more specifically, the patient safety threats and opportunities for enhanced engagement. We will workshop initial findings with system and service stakeholders, including consumers, to develop ideas around potential feasible and appropriate engagement practices for CALD cancer consumers. An innovative approach to Experience-Based Co-design Process (EBCD) will be used at the six study sites in NSW and VIC that includes collaborating with bilingual fieldworkers. The team have used these methods in pilot work together. EBCD processes will lead to the output of multiple engagement practices that can enhance patient safety and are tailored to the diverse CALD populations within each service. A further output will be a set of principles to guide the development of engagement practices for patient safety for use with CALD consumers. The principles and practices will be developed through workshops at each site with an expert panel and via a Delphi consensus. The outcome of this work will be significant improvement in the way consumers can engage with cancer services with regard to their safety, thereby empowering CALD cancer consumers to minimise healthcare-associated harm.