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.
Bedside Manner: Advocating for a Relative in the Hospital (WSJ) WSJ Health Blog (free): Five Tips for Helping a Family Member in the Hospital I’ve written before about my questions of why so many hospitals abdicate their leadership responsibility for…
Kevin Meyer, over at Evolving Excellence, recently wrote a good piece on “endorsing” a U.S. presidential candidate. Today, I’m technically Constitution-eligible to be President of the United States, as I’m now 35 years young. However, I’m not nominating myself to…
Healthcare Intelligence Network » Blog Archive » Eight Steps to a Culture of Safety I think words matter. Action matters, also, but the words we use do matter (not that I always choose them well here). Hospitals often use different…
By Mike Thelen: Having spent the last 10 years working within Lean disciplines, it is second nature to identify shortcomings in any business model from a Lean perspective. Since I also have two individuals in my immediate family who work…
Heparin errors and patient harm have been in the news quite a bit the last few years. So what are hospital regulators doing about it? Let’s look at the time line here: 2006: Heparin error kills 3 babies in Indianapolis…
NHS: 60,000 medication blunders in 18 months – Health News, Health & Wellbeing – The Independent Trust me, I’m not picking on the NHS. There’s a lot of good things happening here with Lean and I’ll blog about some of…
Why I Work In Healthcare | DailyKaizen Here’s a great one to end the day on… Lee Fried has a powerful post over on the DailyKaizen blog. Some unfortunately heartache for him and his family, but an important reminder of…
From Modern Healthcare (link no longer available), Tom Peters throws a few verbal bombs at the healthcare industry: Quality gains needn’t be costly, Peters tells HFMA Financial executives can do more to improve healthcare quality and it won’t cost more…
Leading article: Infected by political calculation This isn’t a “Lean” story, per se, but it still caught my eye. Hospital-acquired infections are a major problem throughout the world. As this commentary from The Independent points out: Britain has the worst…
A reader sent this picture from a hospital restroom. I’m not sure if the reader is a patient parent or a hospital employee. They asked, “Why are we putting it on the parents to remind doctors to wash their hands?…
Dennis Quaid Recounts Twins’ Drug Ordeal, Actor Tells 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft Medical Errors Kill Thousands – CBS News Did you see the actor Dennis Quaid on 60 Minutes last week? He talked about the sad case where his twin…
Wachter’s World : The Checklist Saga: Victory! This is great news for patients and is probably great news for those of you who have been following the “checklists” saga. The federal government has reversed its earlier decision to shutdown the…
