Fifteen years after the Institute of Medicine published "To Err is Human", the National Patient Safety Foundation has published a report to address gaps left by the IOM's report and save lives.
To address these issues, the NPSF convened a panel of experts earlier this year who penned the report, "Free from Harm: Accelerating Patient Safety Improvement Fifteen Years after To Err is Human."
"Despite some significant successes, we know that far too many people still suffer from avoidable injuries in care," said Don Berwick, MD, president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, who was on both the original IOM panel that wrote "To Err is Human" and on the NPSF panel that created the new report. "One of the objectives of this new work was to identify the gaps and outline the actions to save far more lives and avert far more harm."
Within the report, experts provide eight recommendations for achieving total systems safety in healthcare. Those tips are:
1. Ensure leaders create and sustain a culture of safety
2. Create centralized, coordinated oversight of patient safety
3. Make a common set of safety metrics reflecting meaningful outcomes
4. Increase funding for patient safety and implementation science research
5. Look at patient safety across the entire care continuum
6. Support healthcare workers
7. Partner with patients and their families
8. Make technology safe and optimized to improve patient safety
The report and its executive summary can be downloaded here.