Provider responsibility and system redesign: two sides of the same coin

Patient safety is a serious problem that health care professionals and hospitals must confront. The health care delivery system must be redesigned. Health care professionals have a moral and ethical responsibility to actively participate in the development and operation of well-designed care processes. Efforts to redesign the delivery system will be most effective if accompanied by changes in the environment that shapes care delivery. Health care leadership must also focus attention on identifying the types of environmental changes needed at different levels, and on the part of specific stakeholders, to allow model twenty-first-century community health systems to develop.