As health and social care systems across Europe increasingly shift care from institutional settings to the home, informal caregivers—family members, friends, and significant others—have become central actors in maintaining the safety and well-being of individuals with long-term conditions, disabilities, or age-related needs. Despite their critical role, informal caregivers’ experiences of safety events, near misses, unintended harms, and caregiving-related mistakes remain underexplored in patient safety and quality-of-care research.
This special issue seeks to address this gap by bringing together a series of country-specific qualitative case studies that examine patient safety in home care from the perspective of informal caregivers. It aims to present analytically rich, context-sensitive case studies, each grounded in its respective national setting. While all participating countries followed a shared overarching research framework, data analysis was conducted independently within each country, allowing for in-depth exploration of cultural, organizational, and policy-specific dynamics shaping safety in home care.

Home care differs fundamentally from institutional healthcare environments. It is characterized by limited professional oversight, fragmented services, informal decision-making, and blurred boundaries between professional and family caregiving. These conditions create safety challenges that are often invisible to healthcare systems, under-reported in formal quality indicators, and insufficiently addressed in policy and practice. By foregrounding informal caregivers’ voices, the proposed special issue will provide nuanced empirical insight into how safety events are recognized, interpreted, managed, and learned from in everyday care.

Aims:

• Explore informal caregivers’ narratives and lived experiences related to safety events, errors, near misses, and unintended harms in home care.
• Examine how caregivers recognize, cope with, and learn from caregiving-related mistakes over time.
• Identify learning processes, coping strategies, and adaptations in everyday care practices following safety incidents.
• Provide in-depth, context-sensitive accounts of home care safety within different national systems, highlighting how cultural norms, welfare structures, service organization, and regulatory environments shape caregiving practices and safety.
• Generate standalone case studies that, taken together, illuminate the diversity and complexity of home care safety across settings, without assuming direct cross-national comparability.

This special issue offers a timely and innovative contribution by expanding patient safety research into the home care domain and by making visible the critical, yet often overlooked, safety work performed by informal caregivers.

Manuscript submission information:

The Journal’s submission system is now open for submissions for the Special Issue “Patient Safety in Home Care: A Cross-National Collection of Case Studies”.

When submitting your manuscript, please select the article type ‘VSI: Homecare safety through informal caregiver voices’ whichever is applicable. The submissions will be accepted for the special issue until 31^st October 2026.

All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers.

Once your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production and will be simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled into the online Special Issue. Articles from this Special Issue will appear in different regular issues of the journal, though they will be clearly marked and branded as Special Issue articles.

Please see an example here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/science-of-the-total-environment/special-issue/10SWS2W7VVV

Please ensure you read the Guide for Authors before writing your manuscript.

The Guide for Authors: Guide for authors - Journal of Healthcare Quality Research - ISSN 2603-6479 | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier

The link to submit your manuscript is available on the Journal’s homepage at: Editorial Manager®.

For queries, you may also write electronically to jhqr@elsevier.com.

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