Background and context: Patient safety protocols in mental health are often given less importance than they merit. Procedures to enhance the culture of safety in mental health facilities can benefit not only patients and their families, but also providers and administrators. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation’s Actionable Patient Safety Solutions around mental health highlight the importance of tools such as collaborative care planning and comfort care kits.

Aim: This article aims to provide an insight into patient and clinician experiences using the collaborative care planning and comfort kits outlined in Actionable Patient Safety Solutions.

Conclusions: Collaborative care planning and the development of elements such as comfort care kits have the potential to improve patient experiences, outcomes and safety. From the organisational point of view, Actionable Patient Safety Solutions have the potential to improve cost effectiveness and structural efficiency.

Implications for practice:

• Collaborative care planning has been shown to reduce the incidence of patients harm and suicide
• It is low cost and can easily be tailored to specific contexts
• There is significant potential for a reduction in organisational inefficiencies, clinically, structurally, and financially with the adoption of a collaborative care planning model
• Understanding the firsthand perspectives of patients and clinicians themselves can offer significant insight for implementation in other settings

This article by Janice Fyfe, Olivia Lounsbury, Taylore Einarsson, Donna Prosser is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 License.