NPSF Names Don Berwick and Kaveh Shojania as Co-Chairs of Expert Panel on Patient Safety

The healthcare field has made significant effort to accelerate patient safety since publication of To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, the Institute of Medicine’s groundbreaking 1999 report on medical errors. This month in Boston, the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF), a central voice for patient safety since 1997, convenes an expert panel to assess the state of the patient safety field since then and to set the stage for the next 15 years of work.

Co-chaired by Donald Berwick, MD, MPP, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and president emeritus and senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Kaveh Shojania, MD, director of the Centre for Quality and Improvement and Patient Safety, University of Toronto, and editor-in-chief of BMJ Quality & Safety, the panel will review advances in patient safety and develop strategic recommendations for future focus.

“One of the goals of this project is to galvanize the field to move forward with a unified view of the future of patient safety and with an eye toward the NPSF vision of creating a world where patients and those who care for them are free from harm,” said Tejal K. Gandhi, MD, MPH, CPPS, president and CEO, NPSF. “We are pleased and honored to have Drs. Berwick and Shojania leading this effort.”

Dr. Berwick was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Quality of Care in America Committee, which produced To Err Is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, influential reports addressing health care safety and quality. “We have learned a lot about patient safety and the prevention of medical errors since the publication of those reports, but we recognize that there is more work to be done,” said Dr. Berwick. “We expect a lively, broad discussion to not only look at where we’ve been, but also set the course for the future priorities in patient safety and health care quality.”

The panel is expected to produce a report offering strategic recommendations to drive patient safety through the next decade and beyond. “We’ve seen a tremendous increase in patient safety research over the last 15 years,” said Dr. Shojania. “While reviewing this evidence will play a role in informing the report, we really hope to use the input from a wide range of experts and stakeholders to map out where the field needs to go from here in order to achieve some real breakthroughs in the coming years.”

The panel’s meeting, “The State of Patient Safety: 15 Years Since the IOM Report ‘To Err is Human,’” takes place February 23-24, 2015, in Boston. The panel’s report is expected to be released this summer.

The project is being made possible in part by a generous grant from AIG, which insures over 2,000 hospitals, health care systems, and ambulatory care facilities globally, to advance the patient safety mission.