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Announcing the 2026 EMS Patient Safety Webinar Series
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For decades, EMS has been asking: What is patient safety?
The problem has never been a lack of concern. Instead, it has been a lack of clear, EMS-specific answers.
Too often, patient safety in EMS has been defined by what it is not: not QA, not discipline, not another compliance program. What has been missing is a shared understanding of what patient safety actually is, how it functions in a high-risk, autonomous environment, and how EMS systems can intentionally design for safety rather than rely on improvisation and individual heroics.
The Center for Patient Safety is offering those answers.
A new, three-part EMS webinar series is intentionally structured as a progression, meeting EMS where it is today and guiding organizations toward safer, more reliable systems of care. From foundational concepts to operational infrastructure, to advanced system design, this year’s series is built for EMS leaders, clinicians, educators, and medical directors who are ready to move patient safety from theory into practice.
What Is Patient Safety in EMS?
Patient safety is not QA, and it is not discipline. Yet in EMS, those concepts are still frequently conflated.
What Is Patient Safety in EMS? is the introductory course in the 2026 series and establishes a shared mental model of patient safety tailored specifically to prehospital care. This webinar focuses on defining patient safety as a discipline, explaining why harm in EMS is most often systemic, and reframing safety as a function of system design rather than individual performance.
Participants will explore:
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What patient safety actually means in EMS
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How patient safety differs from traditional QA/QI and compliance models
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Why reporting, learning, and trust are foundational to safer care
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How culture and system design influence outcomes in the field
This webinar is ideal for EMS clinicians, supervisors, educators, medical directors, and executives who want a clear, practical understanding of patient safety and why it matters in modern EMS.
Collaborative Just Culture and High Reliability in EMS
Patient safety is necessary, but there’s more!
This webinar, Collaborative Just Culture and High Reliability in EMS, moves beyond patient safety to examine what it takes for EMS systems to perform reliably under conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and risk. This advanced webinar explores how Collaborative Just Culture® and Collaborative High Reliability® intersect and why collaboration across an agency is essential for sustained safety.
This webinar examines:
- The relationship between Just Culture and High Reliability
- Why collaboration is critical in complex EMS systems
- How trust, transparency, and learning enable reliability
- What it takes to sustain safety in high-risk, high-consequence environments
Designed for senior leaders, medical directors, and system designers, this webinar challenges EMS to think beyond individual agencies and toward shared responsibility for safety and reliability.
How to Implement a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) for EMS
Understanding patient safety is only the first step. The next challenge is building the infrastructure to support it.
How to Implement a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) for EMS is a deeper dive into how EMS agencies can operationalize patient safety using federally protected PSO frameworks. This webinar moves beyond definitions and into the legal, operational, and cultural components required to create sustainable safety programs that clinicians trust and use.
Participants will explore:
- What a PSO is and what it is not
- How federal PSO protections apply to EMS agencies
- Designing reporting and learning systems that support improvement, not punishment
- Using PSO participation to shift from isolated event review to system-level learning
This webinar is designed for EMS leaders and organizations ready to move from understanding patient safety to actively building it into daily operations.
What’s Next?
Each webinar can be taken independently, but together they provide a comprehensive roadmap for EMS organizations committed to reducing harm, supporting clinicians, and building systems that learn instead of blame.
Registration details, schedules, and continuing education information are available on each course page. We invite you to join us in 2026 as we continue the work of making patient safety a core function of EMS, not an afterthought.