Quotes
for Healthcare
IOM
report - To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (1999):
"The biggest
challenge to moving toward a safer health system is changing the culture from one of
blaming individuals for errors to one in which errors are treated not as
personal failures, but as opportunities to improve the system and prevent
harm."
James
Bagian, Director, VA
“The biggest
challenge in reducing medical errors and making hospitals safer places is
changing the culture of medicine.”
From
the article Culture Shock, The Combat Edge (Jan 95).
The founder of the safety culture assessment program
in the military today, Lt Col Alan Groben, explained:
“… many recent mishaps occurred not because an
individual forgot to perform a required inspection or a pilot violated a
regulation or procedure. Instead, there
were dysfunctional unit cultures that allowed the
errors to happen, and these cultures were the root
causes of the mishaps.”
From the article Safety
Culture Assessment: a Tool For Improving Patient Safety in Healthcare, Quality
and Safety in Health Care, Dec 2003 v12 i6 pii17(7).
Authors Dr. VF Nieva and Dr. J Sorra discuss safety culture assessments:
“Safety culture assessments are new tools in the
patient safety improvement arsenal. These tools can be used to measure
organizational conditions that lead to adverse events and patient harm, and for
developing and evaluating safety improvement interventions in healthcare
organizations. They provide a metric by which the implicit shared
understandings about "the way we do things around here" can be made
visible and available as input for change. Safety culture assessment should be
viewed as the starting point from which action planning begins and patient
safety changes emerge.”
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
former CEO IBM
“The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything.”
LUCIAN L. LEAPE, M.D. Professor Health Policy,
“Safety pays.”