Opinion: A new approach can take patient safety to the next level
Doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers sometimes make mistakes. They can also anticipate them and prevent them from happening.
For many hospitals and health care systems, improving safety means being alert to things that go wrong, finding out why they happened, and fixing them. While this is a helpful approach, adding a new one aimed at anticipating errors can take patient safety to an entirely new level.
In 1999, the Institute of Medicine published This landmark report turned a spotlight on medical errors and the resulting harm to patients. Before the report, most
