A Hacked Hospital Is a Patient Safety Problem. Here Are Four Ways to Protect Yourself.

It’s Canadian Patient Safety Week. A new patient-written guide says the newest threat to your care is digital, and most of us were never told what to do about it. Here’s your cheat sheet.

It’s Canadian Patient Safety Week (October 26 to 30, run by Healthcare Excellence Canada). Most years the conversation is about the things that have always gone wrong in a hospital: the wrong medication, the missed diagnosis, the infection, the surgical error. Those still matter.

This year a group of patients added a chapter nobody taught you. Their guide, Cyber Safety Is Patient Safety, points at the research. A 2026 systematic review pulled together 59 studies from 13 countries, Canada among them, plus thousands of posts from patients and staff in online health forums. It catalogued 316 documented patient harms tied to hospital cyberattacks.

What’s actually going on

Start with the baseline. The World Health Organization estimates that about 1 in 10 patients is harmed while receiving care, and more than half of that harm is preventable. Cyberattacks are a new entry on that preventable list.

Attacks on hospitals used to be about stealing data to sell. Now they’re built to  ...