Safety
Why Safety?
Medical errors kill 98,000 Americans each year. That’s the equivalent of a 270-passenger jumbo jet crashing every day - more deaths than breast cancer, AIDS, or car accidents cause. There’s also an alarming economic toll from unnecessary and unsafe care. Preventable medical errors cost anywhere from $17-$29 billion annually. These consequences disproportionately impact minorities and low-income patients.
As a National Priority, eradicating preventable medical errors will protect patients from harm, leading to more affordable, effective, and equitable care.
There has been important progress in improving safety, but it must be more widespread. A drive toward zero preventable errors and zero harm to patients will call on healthcare leaders to ensure their organizations embrace a culture of safety in order to learn from past mistakes and accelerate improvement.
Share your safety stories, or learn more about this Priority.
National Priorities Partnership Safety Convening Workshop
July 27 - 28, 2010 | 8:30 am - 1:00 pm
The National Priorities Partnership (NPP) Safety Convening Workgroup was held on July 27-28, 2010, at the Grand Hyatt Washington, located at 1000 H Street, NW, in Washington, DC.
The aim of this meeting was to consider the current state of the area of safety in perioperative care and develop recommendations to present to the NPP Partners and other stakeholder groups that:
- Identify barriers to achieving the objectives and develop a plan to address these barriers, including specific actions that Partners and other stakeholders can take, focusing on identified drivers;
- Identify gaps in practices and measurement and develop a plan for filling high-priority gaps; and
- Address implications for health information technology (HIT).
The meeting agenda and materials are posted below for your reference.
Saving Lives and Resources
The Partners are working to ensure that:
- All healthcare organizations and their staff will strive to ensure a culture of safety while driving to lower the incidence of healthcare-induced harm, disability or death toward zero. They will focus relentlessly on continually reducing and seeking to eliminate all healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) and serious adverse events.
- All hospitals will reduce preventable and premature hospital-level mortality rates to best-in-class.
- All hospitals and their community partners will improve 30-day mortality rates following hospitalization for select conditions (acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, pneumonia) to best-in-class.
Supporting Resources
Safety in the News