Culture Change Can Be Crucial to Patient Safety – An Interview with Tom Krause

Culture Change Can Be Crucial to Patient Safety – An Interview with Tom Krause

ByTom Krause

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Ensuring patient safety depends on having the right organizational culture. Achieving a culture of patient safety requires an organizational-wide effort. INTERVIEW WITH TOM KRAUSE by Greg Freeman Risk managers often hear that patient safety initiatives and other improvement efforts must have support from the top if they are to succeed, but the real…

Should Your Organization Integrate Worker Safety and Patient Safety?

ByTom Krause

After many years of safety consulting with organizations of all kinds, including those in health and medical care, I’m struck by the division in healthcare between ‘patient safety’ and ‘worker safety’. In most healthcare organizations these two types of safety have separate staffing, metrics, prevention initiatives and systems, and overall leadership emphasis. I believe this…

Scorecard Needed

ByTom Krause

You’ve see the astounding numbers: hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year due to medical treatment errors. Indeed, the median credible estimate is 350,000, more than U.S. combat deaths in all of World War II. If you measure the “value of life” the way economists and federal agencies do it – that is, by…