Hidden in Plain Sight: Sharing the “Field of View” Model of Workplace Safety at the 2026 BC Care Providers Association Annual Conference in Whistler

I recently had the opportunity to present at the BC Care Providers Association 2026 annual conference on a topic that has become central to my work in healthcare safety, workforce wellbeing, and organizational learning: how leaders can expand their field of view to see risks earlier.

The session, Hidden in Plain Sight: How Expanding Your Field of View Saves Money and Creates Safer Workplaces, explored a challenge that many senior care organizations know well. Significant resources are often consumed by preventable injuries and reactive interventions, rather than being invested in strengthening care delivery, staff wellbeing, and organizational sustainability.

The core idea was simple: many organizations manage health and safety based on what is most visible — obvious hazards and reported injuries. But that narrow view captures only a small portion of the risk present within an organization. By focusing only on what is visible, healthcare leaders can miss the pressures, assumptions, workarounds, and conditions shaping decisions every day.

The Safety Spectrum

As part of the presentation, I introduced the Safety Spectrum, a model designed to help leaders think more broadly about the factors that influence safety before an injury occurs.

At the centre of the model are the issues leaders most commonly see: injuries, incidents, and obvious hazards. In long-term care, these might include resident lift and transfer injuries, violence incidents, faulty equipment, blocked exits, or unsafe rooms.

But there is always more to the story.

The Safety Spectrum extends outward in two directions: human factors and system factors. The human side includes behaviours, capabilities, and beliefs. The system side includes conditions, processes, and design. These factors are not isolated. Conditions shape behaviours. Processes shape capabilities. Design influences beliefs.

This matters because many of the factors that create risk are not immediately visible.

A staff member may rush a lift because the unit is busy. A worker may not report a near miss because they believe nothing will change. A care team may develop workarounds because the formal process is too slow or impractical. A resident care plan may not contain the information staff need to deliver care safely and consistently. These are not always individual failures. Often, they are signs of deeper conditions within the work system.

FOV Thinking

The second concept I shared was FOV, or Field of View Thinking.

A leader’s field of view is how much of the Safety Spectrum they can see and understand. A narrow field of view focuses mostly on injuries and hazards. A broader field of view helps leaders see behaviours, capabilities, beliefs, conditions, processes, and design.

FOV Thinking is about widening that view.

It helps organizations move from simply managing incidents to understanding what is behind them. The risks, pressures, behaviours, and beliefs are already shaping outcomes every day. The question is whether we can see them clearly enough to respond earlier and more effectively — before they become injuries, claims, staffing disruptions, or burnout.

For me, the value of the model is that it moves away from blame. It is not about blaming individuals, and it is not about vaguely blaming “the system.” It is about seeing health and safety more holistically so leaders can ask better questions, understand the real conditions of work, and make better decisions earlier.

Using Tools as Light

A key message from the presentation was that organizations need better ways to illuminate what is already happening.

If the challenge is that we are only seeing a small portion of the Safety Spectrum, then the practical question becomes: how do we see more?

In the session, we used two examples of tools that can expand visibility. The first was the Health & Safety Dashboard, an anonymous safety reporting platform with real-time analytics that we built at Louis Brier to disrupt burdensome, lengthy, and non-transparent safety reporting processes. The second was OntheJob, a simulation-based educational platform that provides insight into how staff think, decide, and respond in realistic situations.

The dashboard primarily helped illuminate system-side factors: conditions, processes, design features, and emerging patterns. OntheJob primarily helped illuminate human-side factors: how staff think, make decisions, and respond under real workplace pressure.

But the broader lesson was not that every organization needs the same tools. The lesson was that no single initiative shows everything. Leadership walkabouts, listening sessions, pulse surveys, safety huddles, dashboards, simulation learning, and frontline conversations can all broaden an organization’s field of view. The real message is curiosity: organizations that create more opportunities to listen, observe, and learn will naturally see more over time.

Making the Invisible Visible

The Health & Safety Dashboard was one practical example of FOV Thinking in action.

At Louis Brier, we implemented the dashboard because we wanted to uncover risks staff were experiencing but might not be bringing to light. We knew there was more happening on the units than what surfaced through traditional reporting or leadership walkabouts. Too often, investigations showed that a problem had existed for some time before it resulted in an injury.

The dashboard made it easier for staff to raise a flag. It was anonymous, quick to use, and designed to help managers prioritize, follow up, and track safety issues. It gave staff a simpler way to share what they were already seeing and gave leaders a clearer way to respond.

As reporting increased and concerns surfaced more consistently, our field of view expanded dramatically. Patterns that had previously remained hidden within the day-to-day complexity of care started becoming visible.

The dashboard helped reveal where risk was building, where incidents were clustering, where care-plan information was missing or unclear, where workflows were breaking down, and where repeated equipment or maintenance issues were creating risk. It also created opportunities for huddles, shared learning conversations, updated care plans, and stronger prevention practices.

What Happened When We Expanded the Field of View

The results were meaningful.

After implementation, Louis Brier experienced a 665% increase in safety reporting. Injury reporting increased by 34%, but serious lost-time injuries decreased by 45%, and claims costs decreased by 52%. Early 2026 results also showed an additional 50% decrease in lost-time injuries compared with the same period the previous year.

Of course, many factors influence injury outcomes over time. I would not attribute those results to one tool alone. But the increase in visibility changed how quickly we were identifying and responding to risk.

That is the heart of FOV Thinking.

When leaders can see more, they can act earlier. When organizations can act earlier, they can prevent more harm. And when they prevent more harm, they avoid spending limited resources on reactive costs that do not advance their mission.

The Leadership Lesson

The broader lesson from the presentation is that safer workplaces are built through visibility, curiosity, and follow-through.

The goal is not perfect visibility. Healthcare will always involve complexity, uncertainty, and risk. The goal is fewer blind spots.

FOV Thinking is about seeing more of what already exists so organizations can respond earlier, protect staff more effectively, and strengthen care continuity. The business case and the moral case point in the same direction: when we see more, we can protect our people better.