Hospital executive proposes six principles to improve patient safety

Citing Florence Nightingale’s admonition to “do the sick no harm,” an executive patient safety officer at Matheny Hospital in Peapack, N.J., recommends focusing on six principles as hospitals strive to eliminate preventable harm. He advocates for a systems approach to reaching high reliability, which shifts the focus from how the clinician failed the patient to how the system failed the clinician. Central to his vision is making quality improvement “part of everyone’s workday” and embedding it in all processes of care. He also calls for team-based approaches deferring to “expertise over rank.” (Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare story, 1/21/20)