Leading patient safety advocates assess progress in reducing med...( Boston MA It has been five years sinc...),Health

Boston, MA It has been five years since the release of the Institute of Medicine's landmark report on medical errors, "To Err is Human." What progress has been made to improve patient safety since the report found that nearly 100,000 deaths occur annually as a result of medical error? Two of the authors of the report, Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Donald Berwick, CEO of the Institute for HealthCare Improvement, outline the progress and the challenges that face America's health care system in a paper appearing in the May 18, 2005 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The authors found that the report had a positive impact in three important areas of health care; how health care views the task of error prevention, enlisting support of stakeholders and changing practices. Prior to the publication of To Err is Human, blaming individuals for medical injury and error was the norm, but the authors find that attitude has given way to the concept that bad systems, not bad people, lead to the majority of medical injuries and errors.

Another major effect of the report was signing up key health care organizations to get together to improve patient safety, starting with the federal government. Congress, in 2001, appropriated $50 million for patient safety research, enabling hundreds of new investigators to pursue patient safety research and establish it as a legitimate academic area of study. Since 2004, funding has been redirected toward information technology, however Congress did name the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) as the lead federal agency for patient safety. AHRQ established the Center for Quality Improvement and Safety, which has become the nation's leading source for education, training, disseminating information, developing measures and facilitating the setting of standards for furthering patient safety efforts.
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Contact: Kevin C. Myron
kmyron@hsph.harvard.edu
617-432-3952
Harvard School of Public Health
17-May-2005

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