Grasping the opportunity to improve the safety of care

Clearly a wakeup call for the healthcare industry, the IOM report of 2000 To Err Is Human now appears to have been a sentinel event, at least in the United States (Institute of Medicine 1999). Given that the practice of medicine in the United States is, in many ways, very similar to that in Canada--for example, our physician trainees are educated and evaluated using similar models--it is unfortunate that the IOM report was not also a wakeup call for Canada. Four years have passed, and apparently Canadians have only recently woke up to front-page newspaper headlines that point out that Canadians, like Americans, are being harmed and killed as a result of medical errors.