Take Charge!

Patient safety is paramount in our quest for high quality and reliable healthcare. As caregivers, we struggle with an inconvenient truth: Humans make mistakes. No human performs perfectly 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Unfortunately, perfection is expected of physicians and nurses. Such unrealistic expectations lead us to use a system of training and punishment that operates under the myth of perfect medical performance. The goal is not attainable, yet we perpetuate this myth day after day. The myth also precludes us from properly examining the systems issues that fail to protect patients from human error.

A medical error is defined as the “failure of a planned action to be completed as intended or the use of a wrong plan to achieve an aim…including problems in practice, products, procedures and systems.”

Even after more than 10 years of national effort, medical errors persist at alarming rates. A group of investigators reported there were approximately 37,600,000 annual admissions to 5,000 U.S. hospitals. Using the IHI Global Trigger Tool method, they estimated there were 49 adverse events per 100 admissions. That amounts to 18,424,000 adverse events annually in the United States. That astonishing number alone should motivate us to action. However, productive improvements in this area have been slow.

You can take action today... Demand that your healthcare providers wash their hands before and after they see you. Ask questions and demand answers such as: What is my diagnosis? What do I have to do to get better? What if I do nothing? Are there alternative treatments? Get a second opinion from an academic medical center.