Canadian Patient Safety Week 2025
Campaign Strategy and Development for Healthcare Excellence Canada.
THE PROJECT:
Canadian Patient Safety Week is a nationwide event, participated in by clinics, practitioners, health leaders, and patients across the country, led by Healthcare Excellence Canada. The initiative celebrated its’ 20 year anniversary in 2025 marking two decades dedicated to patient safety, focused on listening, learning, and amplifying voices under this year’s theme: All Voices for Safer Care.
In Canada, one in seventeen hospitals are still involved in unintended harm, making the work that HEC does in this campaign pivotal to encouraging safe, respectful and supportive care. CPSW’s focus on amplifying voices meant that our campaign design needed to foster genuine trust and open dialogue, through approachable and accessible materials and initiatives.
THE OPPORTUNITY:
Working within an agency as one of two designers, our challenge was to design a brand identity that aligned with HEC as a whole yet was distinct enough to garner genuine and dedicated engagement from key stakeholders. This meant our scope was large, and needed to resonate with both patients and practitioners alike.
HEC needed a media campaign fit for all communication channels, requiring deliverables such as a key and alternative poster, complete social templates for speaker quotes, webinar announcements and event info, as well as email templates and zoom backgrounds for staff.
With storytelling as a key component of amplifying voices, HEC also launched an All Voices for Safer Care Blog, requiring visual media for these posts.
The final element of development was a Safer Care in Action in-person activation, in which practitioners assembled walls with written out cards answering the question “I see safer care when…”. This interactive element of the campaign required physical deliverables such as answer cards, and merch items to drive engagement such as stickers, buttons, and printable posters.
The robust approach aimed at meeting patients where they are, whether that meant creating materials to be seen within a clinic, or social assets for when they are on their own. All materials were version in English and French to reflect both official Canadian languages, in addition to careful adherence to AODA colour and font guidelines.
THE IMPACT:
Though the breadth of the project was wide, spanning digital and physical dimensions, the opportunity to make a meaningful impact through many streams and to many people was invaluable. The campaign served as a benchmark in my career of what purpose-driven design should be.
The result of our creative strategy and implementation was over 1,300 attendees registered to CPSW webinars, over 1750 downloads of key materials, and over 170 organizations hosting local or virtual events.