Patient Partners

We believe that patient engagement is a key facet to health care improvement and always aim to keep the patient perspective at the heart of our work.

Patients, families and caregivers are experts in their own experiences and are valuable partners when it comes to improving our health care system. For this reason, we work to incorporate the patient voice in everything from our learning programs to our provincial initiatives, and aim to support patient partners by helping them to build capability and capacity wherever possible. This includes engaging patients in the Quality Forum.


Opportunities for Patient Partners

We engage patient partners from the very first day of planning as members of our Steering Committee to work alongside a wide range of stakeholders from across BC to help guide event content, flow and overall participant experience. Two patient partners from the Patient Voices Network are already hard at work shaping this year’s program!

We are recruiting two patient partners through the Patient Voices Network to help review abstracts in support of selecting which projects will be chosen to be presented at this year’s Quality Forum. They will also judge storyboards during the Storyboard Reception as part of the main Forum programming.

This opportunity for Quality Forum 2024 will be open soon.

Health Quality BC will once again sponsor patient partners through the Patient Voices Network to attend the Quality Forum so that they can learn about improving quality of care while sharing their knowledge, perspectives and experiences with other participants.

We strongly encourage other organizations to support patient partners to attend the Quality Forum as well.

All Quality Forum programming is open to patient partners and we strive to ensure the event is accessible for all attendees.

We encourage patient partners to submit abstracts for consideration through the Call for Abstracts, either for work they have undertaken independently or as an engaged patient partner with a health care organization.

Abstracts on independent projects that are selected for presentation will be eligible for sponsorship through us. We encourage our health system partners to work with the patients, families and caregivers on their project teams when submitting abstracts and support them to attend the Quality Forum as co-speakers wherever possible.

Our program also includes patient partners and other people with lived and living experience as speakers in a number of focus sessions and workshops.

Patient partners who aren’t able to attend the Quality Forum in person are invited to watch live or recorded broadcasts of the event, take part in online discussions around the content of the program and continue their learning through our many presentations files, which are made available whenever possible.