The National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) has convened an expert panel to assess the state of the patient safety field over the past 15 years and to set the stage for the next 15 years of work.
The NPSF said that the health care field has made significant effort to accelerate patient safety since publication of To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the Institute of Medicine’s ground breaking 1999 report on medical errors, and the panel would assess the field since then.
Co-chaired by Dr Donald Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Dr Kaveh Shojania, director of the Centre for Quality and Improvement and Patient Safety, University of Toronto, and editor-in-chief of BMJ Quality & Safety, the panel will review advances in patient safety and develop strategic recommendations for future focus.
“One of the goals of this project is to galvanize the field to move forward with a unified view of the future of patient safety and with an eye toward the NPSF vision of creating a world where patients and those who care for them are free from harm,” said Tejal Gandhi, president and chief executive officer, NPSF. “We are pleased and honored to have doctors Berwick and Shojania leading this effort.”
Berwick was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Quality of Care in America Committee, which produced ‘To Err Is Human’ and ‘Crossing the Quality Chasm’, influential reports addressing health care safety and quality.
“We have learned a lot about patient safety and the prevention of medical errors since the publication of those reports, but we recognize that there is more work to be done,” said Berwick. “We expect a lively, broad discussion to not only look at where we’ve been, but also set the course for the future priorities in patient safety and health care quality.”
The panel is expected to produce a report offering strategic recommendations to drive patient safety through the next decade and beyond.
“We’ve seen a tremendous increase in patient safety research over the last 15 years,” said Shojania. “While reviewing this evidence will play a role in informing the report, we really hope to use the input from a wide range of experts and stakeholders to map out where the field needs to go from here in order to achieve some real breakthroughs in the coming years.”
The project is being made possible in part by a grant from insurer AIG.
NPSF, Dr Donald Berwick, Risk Management, Dr Kaveh Shojania, US, Tejal Gandhi, IT and Data Security, AIG