Patient Safety's Future through the Lens of an Organizational Scientist

June 22nd, 2021

In 1999 the Institute of Medicine’s To Err is Human report pushed patient safety onto the public stage although the problem of medical harm had been recorded since ancient times. Central to the report were illustrations of safety principles from high-risk industries and various insights from the high-reliability organization paradigm. In effect, the authors of the report conceded that health care is not unique among high-risk, high-reliability industries because it too is concerned with learning how to prevent, detect, recover, and learn from mishaps and accidents. Twenty years later, we have to ask two questions: Has the fight for keeping patients safe gained traction from these domains of insight? Are these ideas still worthy of healthcare’s attention? This presentation addresses these questions and weighs in on the continuing relevance of insights from outside of health care.

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (Ph.D. University of Texas – Austin) is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Carey Business School, the School of Medicine (Anesthesia and Critical Care Medicine), the School of Nursing, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She is also Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Her research program has been devoted to investigating how organizations and their members cope with uncertainty and how organizations can be designed to be more reliable and resilient. She has investigated organizational safety, high reliability and resilience practices in oil exploration and production, wildland firefighting, and in healthcare. Her research has appeared widely in management and healthcare journals. Her most recent book Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle Managing of American Medicine, co-authored with the late Dr. Robert Wears, was published last year by Oxford University Press.