Coproducing Patient Safety: Policy and Practice for Engaging, Detecting, and Acting on Patient and Family Safety Concerns in Health Care

Patients and families are often the first to sense that something has gone wrong in their care, and the clearest source of information about risks that formal systems fail to capture. Whether that signal reaches someone who can act on it depends on structures that few health systems have deliberately built: how safety concerns are heard, who is trusted to raise them, and what happens after they are voiced. World Patient Safety Day, observed annually on 17 September, has repeatedly returned to this theme, most recently calling for the meaningful engagement of patients and communities in identifying safety risks and co-developing solutions with health professionals and policymakers. The Global Patient Safety Action Plan 2021 to 2030 names patient and family engagement as a strategic objective in its own right. Yet the policy instruments that would make that engagement routine, funded, and accountable remain underdeveloped.Coproduction reframes patients and carers not as recipients of safe care but as partners who help produce it. A growing body of evidence shows that patients notice risks that clinicians and reporting systems miss, that they often sense danger before it is documented, and that nurses' and clinicians' judgments about whether to trust and act on a patient's concern shape outcomes as much as the concern itself. What is still missing is the translational layer: which mechanisms for detecting, voicing, and escalating patient-identified risk actually work at scale, whose voices are systematically missed, and how findings are converted into policy, accreditation standards, and organizational practice.The goal of this Research Topic is to assemble international evidence on how patients, families, and communities can be meaningfully involved in coproducing safer care: how unsafety is detected, how patients and carers are given genuine voice, how their input is acted upon, and what policies are needed to embed this across health systems. We welcome contributions spanning high, middle, and low income settings, and particularly welcome work co-authored with people who have lived experience of receiving care.We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:• Mechanisms and validated measures for detecting and capturing patient and carer identified safety concerns, including patient measures of safety and patient-reported experience of harm.• How clinicians judge, trust, and act on patients' and families' expressed safety concerns.• Coproduction models for safety: patients and carers as active partners in codesigning solutions, not only reporting problems.• What happens after a patient speaks up: escalation pathways, speak-up policies, response systems, and organizational accountability.• Translating patient engagement evidence into public health policy, national safety strategies, and accreditation standards.• Equity in whose safety concerns are heard and acted upon, including language, health literacy, digital access, and marginalised populations.• Patient and family participation in care transitions and handovers, where safety risk is heightened.• Person-centred structures for two-way communication, such as bedside shift report, ward rounds, and shared decision-making.• Evaluations of national, regional, or campaign-level engagement initiatives, including World Patient Safety Day programmes.We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Systematic Reviews, Perspectives, Opinions, Brief Research Reports, Study Protocols, Policy and Practice Reviews, Policy Briefs, Community Case Studies, Hypothesis and Theory, and Methods papers.Manuscripts focused solely on clinical treatment efficacy, diagnostic methods, pharmaceuticals, health insurance and financing, or healthcare workforce satisfaction without a clear link to patient engagement and public health policy fall outside the scope of this collection. Topic editors: Patricia Groves, Julie K Johnson, Deborah Debono, Danielle Olds Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85362/coproducing-patient-safety-policy-and-practice-for-engaging-detecting-and-acting-on-patient-and-family-safety-concerns-in-health-care