Involving patients, family, partners and/or carers in measuring and monitoring patient safety in hospitals: Protocol for an umbrella review

Two appendices which accompanied the submission of this Umbrella review protocol to the HRB Open Research Journal; Appendix 1. PRISMA-P checklist, and Appendix 2. Full search strategy for all five electronic databases. While substantive efforts have been made to improve the safety of hospital care, these have largely targeted the healthcare professional. Such a focus ignores the patient’s ‘voice’, and the unique insights patients and their families have into healthcare system functioning. Despite international policy shifts toward empowering patients to support patient safety, there remains a lack of knowledge regarding the full range of existing approaches for facilitating patient involvement in measuring and monitoring patient safety (MMS) in hospital settings. This umbrella review will aim to identify existing approaches to involving adult inpatients (or family/partners/carers communicating on their behalf) in MMS in hospital settings, along with evidence supporting their use.