Status of quality initiatives, Part II

Speaking at the first national Summit on Medical Errors and Patient Safety Research last September, former American Hospital Association Chairman Gordon Sprenger called for plugging the research holes in several areas to improve patient safety. He identified critical areas where more research to improve patient safety would be helpful: changing the culture of health care, learning from other high-risk fields, studying the value of current safety practices, examining safety in nonhospital setting, closing the gaps between knowledge and practice, creating early warning systems, and looking at the human factors. Specifically, Sprenger raised the following questions to explore: What are the critical factors that make for a more open learning environment? What regulatory and legislative changes are necessary to create a nonpunitive, blameless environment? What has worked to improve safety in other fields? What is transferable to health care? Which of the current safety practices work well and how can they be improved? Which don't? How can systems solutions that prevent errors be adapted for settings outside of the hospital that are smaller and have less organizational structure? How can accepted standards of care and appropriate use of new technologies to improve care be better shared? Are they properly used? How can we make better use of precursor events to predict the occurrence of medical error? How can we involve patients in identifying potential errors? How can we advance our understanding of why humans err?