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When It Comes to Patient Safety, ‘Good Enough’ Is Simply Not | PSQH

By David Goldsteen, CEO of VigiLanz

In the early 1980s, when I was young in my emergency medicine career, patient safety and risk management were somewhat novel concepts in healthcare. At the time, even hand washing processes went unregimented. Medicine lacked the standardized processes and safety interventions we take for granted today, which often meant that pharmaceutical dosage or interaction errors, hospital-acquired infections, and even surgical injuries were likely common, but generally underappreciated and undocumented—and therefore relatively unnoticed.

Thankfully, that was quite a different world from the one we live in today. In just a few decades—and ushered along by watershed publications such as To Err Is Human—the industry has rallied around the interconnected concepts of patient safety and care quality. This is demonstrated daily within countless specialized checklists and infection control protocols, and reflected on a broader scale by the numerous studies, organizations, and conferences dedicated to safety and quality advancements.

Today, healthcare providers are primed and ready to embrace a culture of safety and quality. Within the last decade, we have seen an increasing movement toward value-based care, more initiatives within hospitals dedicated to patient safety, and more appointments of doctors to the C-suite: a key indicator of increasing recognition that clinical executives must help steer strategic decisions as much as financial, technical, and operations leaders do.

Read more from the original article on Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare.