GUARDIANS OF THE PSSM · POLICYMAKERS AND PARTNERS
Make patient-safety commitments visible, credible, and accountable
The Patient Safety Structural Measure creates a national framework for examining whether hospitals have implemented essential systems and practices for safety.
Policymakers and partner organizations can help ensure that this measure is understood by the public, informed by lived experience, and used to encourage meaningful improvement—not reduced to a compliance exercise.
Why the PSSM matters
Many safety failures cannot be understood through a single outcome or event. They are influenced by leadership decisions, organizational culture, communication, transparency, learning systems, accountability, and the role given to patients and families.
The PSSM addresses these foundations. It asks hospitals to report whether they have implemented a set of complementary, systems-oriented patient-safety practices.
That creates an opportunity for public leaders and mission-aligned organizations to ask better questions:
- Can patients and families understand what hospitals are reporting?
- Do hospital attestations reflect practice throughout the organization?
- Are communities able to use the information to support informed dialogue and improvement?
- Are patient and caregiver experiences included in oversight, implementation, and evaluation?
For policymakers and public-sector leaders
Support clear public information
Help make structural-measure information understandable and usable. Technical reporting has greater public value when people can understand what was measured, what a hospital’s response means, and what the measure does not establish.
Ask for evidence of authentic implementation
Formal attestation should be supported by credible evidence and informed by people who experience hospital systems directly, including patients, caregivers, and the workforce.
Bring lived experience into oversight
Patient and caregiver stories can reveal how policies and safety systems function in practice. Responsible use requires consent, accuracy, privacy protection, and care not to generalize beyond what a story can show.
Encourage learning across institutions
Public agencies and policymakers can create opportunities for hospitals, advocates, researchers, and communities to share implementation lessons and identify barriers that require broader action.
For partner organizations
Patient-safety organizations, professional associations, consumer groups, research institutions, community organizations, and other mission-aligned partners can extend the reach and usefulness of the PSSM.
Educate your community
Share accurate, plain-language information about the measure and help your audience understand how leadership, culture, transparency, learning, and patient partnership affect safety.
Connect experience with system change
Use PFPS US tools to help people connect what they experienced with the safety practices intended to protect them.
Convene different perspectives
Bring patients, caregivers, clinicians, hospital leaders, researchers, and public officials into the same conversation about implementation and accountability.
Amplify stories responsibly
Elevate patient and caregiver voices with permission and context. Protect privacy, verify details, and avoid identifying individuals or organizations without appropriate authorization.
For partner organizations
- Share PSSM education and implementation resources with your network.
- Invite patient and caregiver perspectives into meetings, briefings, and learning events.
- Collaborate on public education about structural patient-safety practices.
- Help identify implementation questions that need research or clearer guidance.
- Support ethical development and distribution of attestation stories.
- Connect PFPS US with communities that should be represented in the work.
Partnership proposals should reflect PFPS US’s nonprofit mission and commitment to patient and family engagement.
Use stories responsibly
Stories are powerful because they make systems visible. They should not be used as decoration or as proof of claims they cannot support.
The Guardians’ approach is to connect a verified experience with a specific patient-safety practice and ask what happened, what should have been in place, and what safer care could look like. Story development should protect privacy, respect consent, and preserve the storyteller’s intended meaning.
Help turn a national measure into meaningful public accountability
Partner with patients, caregivers, healthcare teams, and fellow organizations to make hospital safety practices understandable, trustworthy, and useful for improvement.