Tag Archives: Institute for Healthcare Improvement

IHI’s Patient Safety Congress examines virtual care, racism and workplace violence

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Donald Berwick

Donald Berwick speaks at Health Journalism 2011 as CMS administrator.

Leaders in efforts to prevent accidental harm to patients will meet this week to consider challenges presented by the expansion of virtual care as well as the need to address racism and workplace violence in medicine. These are among the topics planned at the Patient Safety Congress held by the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). 

The conference will also delve into efforts to put into effect an initiative known as the “Safer Together: A National Action Plan to Advance Patient Safety” unveiled last year. The plan was the work of 27 organizations including federal agencies, safety groups and experts and patient and family advocates. It builds on the Institute of Medicine’s seminal 1999 report, “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,” which triggered major efforts to reduce cases of preventable harm, particularly in areas such as healthcare-acquired conditions. Continue reading →

Kerry Dooley Young (@kdooleyyoung) is AHCJ's core topic leader on patient safety. She has written extensively about the Food and Drug Administration, medical research, health policy and quality measurements. Her work has appeared in Medscape Medical News, Congressional Quarterly/CQ Roll Call and Bloomberg News.

Berwick reminds next class of doctors of their responsibility

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Several weeks ago I got an email from a Democrat on the Hill that said, “This might make you cry, right there at your desk.” She attached  an essay by Donald Berwick in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Berwick

Donald Berwick

I  saved the email but didn’t open it right away. It was a busy day  in a busy month; I’ve heard Berwick speak often, during and after his stint as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid and when I was lucky enough to attend Institute for Healthcare Improvement conferences and  hear  his soaring, provocative keynotes.  And I had just spoken to him myself a week or so earlier, after the Supreme Court ruling.  I promised myself I’d read this. But later.

August finally arrived, work quieted down (sort of) and as I was trying to slash and delete  my way through the email jungle, I found the Berwick essay.  I clicked.  The person who sent it had been right. I cried right there at my desk.

It was his commencement speech to the graduating class of Harvard Medical School this spring, and it seems on the 40th anniversary of his own HMS graduation.

“You will soon learn a lovely lesson about doctoring; I guarantee it. You will learn that in a professional life that will fly by fast and hard, a hectic life in which thousands of people will honor you by bringing to you their pain and confusion, a few of them will stand out. For reasons you will not control and may never understand, a few will hug your heart, and they will become for you touch points – signposts – like that big boulder on that favorite hike that, when you spot it, tells you exactly where you are. If you allow it – and you should allow it – these patients will enter your soul and you will,  in a way entirely right and proper, love them. These people will be your teachers.”

One of his teachers was a patient he called  Isaiah. Continue reading →

Contributing editor to Politico Magazine and former health care editor-at-large, Politico, Commonwealth Fund journalist in residence and assistant lecturer at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.