Tag Patient Safety

Patient Safety: Learning, Leadership, and Safer Healthcare Systems

Patient safety doesn’t improve through punishment, vigilance posters, or telling people to “be more careful.” It improves when leaders design safer systems, support speaking up, and focus on learning instead of blame. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections on patient safety through a Lean lens—exploring medical errors, near misses, psychological safety, leadership behaviors, and how healthcare organizations can reduce harm by fixing systems rather than blaming individuals.

Giving Tuesday: The Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation

Today is a day known as "Giving Tuesday," to follow up the commercially-driven "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" days.

It's a great day to give to any cause or organization that's meaningful to you.

One organization that I choose to give to throughout the year is the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation. The Batz Foundation produces practical and helpful guidebooks and apps to help protect patients during their hospital stay or other healthcare encounters.

Webinar Archive: “Teaming with Patients to Improve Safety”

I'm excited to be playing host for a KaiNexus webinar on August 30 on a topic that's very important to me (and to many) -- patient safety.

As I mentioned yesterday on LinkedIn, estimates suggest that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States, with approximately 250,000 deaths a year... and that's four times as many deaths as caused by the opioid crisis.

Don't get me wrong, opioid abuse and what happens to patients who end up addicted is horrible. But the newly-named "national emergency" of opioid abuse gets far more attention than what I would call "the international patient safety emergency" that has been around for a long time.

I try bringing attention to the serious, yet solvable, problem of patient harm caused by preventable medical error. That's why I'm happy that we'll have three presenters on the 30th on this topic:

"Teaming with Patients to Improve Safety"
Click here to register - the webinar is free.

Is This a 5S Problem or a Broader Healthcare Leadership and Culture Problem?

A few of you sent me this sad article from the Wall St. Journal: 

"'People Are Dying Here': Federal Hospitals Fail Tribes." 

I feel like I've some variation of this article and exposé many times over. Sometimes, it's some form of government medicine (active duty military medicine, the VA, or another country) or it's a similar sad story from the private healthcare sector (be it non-profit or for-profit).

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