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.
I was nominated to do the ALS “Ice Bucket Challenge.” I think I was officially the last person to do so, judging from my Facebook feed. I made a donation to the ALS Association and also made this video. I’m doing…
There are certainly many serious problems in healthcare. Let’s look at nursing, in particular. It’s a rewarding job, but it’s far more frustrating for nurses than it needs to be. Nurses often don’t have enough time in the day (or…
Today’s post is a link to my article written for the LinkedIn “Influencers” series: Why Every Patient Deserves the Care & Caution that Surrounds the American Ebola Patients Please post a comment here or on LinkedIn (there’s likely to be…
We all know the beaver is “the engineer of the animal kingdom.” That’s why MIT has a beaver as a mascot… It’s an engineer who likes to build things and is generally nocturnal, an apt description of MIT students. A…
Listen: Episode #205 is a conversation with Joe Schnur, VP Business Development at Intelligent M, a company that “designs data-driven hand hygiene compliance improvement solutions for hospitals that dramatically reduce healthcare-acquired infections and their associated costs.” Joe and I share a…
I recently saw a tweet that referenced a May 2014 that was sent to President Obama and his administration: “Report to the President – Better HealthCare and Lower Costs: Accelerating Improvement Through Systems Engineering.” The report was written by the “President’s Council…
I received a tweet the other day from what appears to be a patient safety advocacy group. That’s always great to see. However, I am usually curious to see who the group is, who their leaders are, etc. The website…
Listen My guest for Episode #203 (and for Part 2 of our discussion in episode #207) is Chris Jerry, founder of The Emily Jerry Foundation. The foundation was created in the aftermath of the tragic death of his daughter, Emily – a preventable…
As I sometimes do, I’m going to close out a bunch of browser tabs and share some articles that caught my eye recently but don’t merit full blog posts of their own. I’m cleaning out the LeanBlog backlog and trying…
Today is the first day of the 5th annual Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit. Follow along on Twitter with hashtag #HCSummit14 to see my tweets and thoughts from others. I will be adding updates to this post during the day, as well. These are not…
Happy June, everybody! Summer is here. We’ve actually had a delightfully long spring here in San Antonio, which means the temperature hasn’t really been above 90 yet, which counts as cool (and comfortable for us). I’m headed off to Los…
Sorry to get all Katie Couric on you, but I’m going to have a colonoscopy on Friday. I turned 40 last October and I have some family history that leads my doctor to get one done now rather than at…
