Developing and evaluating a customized evidence-based safety training program for healthcare staff: a quality improvement approach
6 affiliations
- 1Education Department, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
- 2Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto
- 3Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences
- 4Sienna Senior Living
- 5Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University
- 6The Wilson Centre
Abstract
The high risk of workplace violence (WPV) for workers in mental health care settings and the potentially serious impacts, both mental and physical, have prompted many hospitals to mandate behavioral safety skills training for their staff. There are, however, some considerable challenges to delivering this type of training. First, while there are international and national/regional guidelines for mitigating WPV, the evaluation literature does not provide consistent guidance on which training methods are the most effective across a range of settings. Second, hospitals differ in terms of their objectives and their identified safety issues suggesting that a tailored approach rather than a one-size-fits-all training would be more appropriate. Finally, while there are commonly used evaluation frameworks relevant to health care, these will need to be adapted on a case-by-case basis to a tailored training approach. This article will describe models and frameworks addressing the processes involved in developing, implementing, and evaluating customized behavioral safety skills training. Preliminary findings from an actual quality improvement initiative delivered to a long-term care facility in Ontario, Canada will be presented and used as a basis to discuss where theory and actual experience converge and diverge. Successful results include the development of a replicable and theory-grounded customization process along with demonstrated short-term staff-level improvements; however, challenges remain in terms of evaluating organizational-level impact, sustainability, and resident/patient-level outcomes.
Related
- Developing and evaluating patient information leaflets for artificial intelligence use in healthcare
- Developing a multi-component immune model for evaluating the risk of respiratory illness in athletes
- Developing and evaluating per-protocol adherence definitions in a large pragmatic clinical trial: insights from the Diuretic Comparison Project
- Factors associated with the quality of urban geriatric healthcare services empowered by large language models and improvement pathways: a theoretical framework and cross-sectional study
- Developing an operational framework for hybrid cardiac rehabilitation in a safety-net healthcare system
BibTeX
@article{lin2026developing,
title = {{Developing and evaluating a customized evidence-based safety training program for healthcare staff: a quality improvement approach}},
author = {Elizabeth Lin and Hugh Boyd and Emmanuel Bratsalis and Katie Hodgson and Faisal Islam and Muhammad Idrees Khan and Ninon Crestois and Sanjeev Sockalingam},
journal = {Frontiers in Psychiatry},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1901445},
url = {https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1901445/full},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Developing and evaluating a customized evidence-based safety training program for healthcare staff: a quality improvement approach
AU - Elizabeth Lin
AU - Hugh Boyd
AU - Emmanuel Bratsalis
AU - Katie Hodgson
AU - Faisal Islam
AU - Muhammad Idrees Khan
AU - Ninon Crestois
AU - Sanjeev Sockalingam
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
JO - Frontiers in Psychiatry
DO - 10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1901445
UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2026.1901445/full
AB - The high risk of workplace violence (WPV) for workers in mental health care settings and the potentially serious impacts, both mental and physical, have prompted many hospitals to mandate behavioral safety skills training for their staff. There are, however, some considerable challenges to delivering this type of training. First, while there are international and national/regional guidelines for mitigating WPV, the evaluation literature does not provide consistent guidance on which training methods are the most effective across a range of settings. Second, hospitals differ in terms of their objectives and their identified safety issues suggesting that a tailored approach rather than a one-size-fits-all training would be more appropriate. Finally, while there are commonly used evaluation frameworks relevant to health care, these will need to be adapted on a case-by-case basis to a tailored training approach. This article will describe models and frameworks addressing the processes involved in developing, implementing, and evaluating customized behavioral safety skills training. Preliminary findings from an actual quality improvement initiative delivered to a long-term care facility in Ontario, Canada will be presented and used as a basis to discuss where theory and actual experience converge and diverge. Successful results include the development of a replicable and theory-grounded customization process along with demonstrated short-term staff-level improvements; however, challenges remain in terms of evaluating organizational-level impact, sustainability, and resident/patient-level outcomes.
SN - 1664-0640
ER -