Patient Safety Requires Just Culture

The ultimate goal for improving a healthcare organization is to keep patients safe.  Yet each year, nearly 100,000 hospital patients die and many more are harmed from medication errors, healthcare-associated infections, surgical mistakes and other preventable causes.  These adverse events are not the result of healthcare workers’ lack of sophistication or a lack of desire to do the right thing.  Instead, they occur because of a variety of factors that workers can’t control, including outdated work systems, lack of standardized approaches, limited information technology and unreasonable expectations. A commitment to a just culture, founded on accountability, helps transform an organization into one with a patient-centric, learning focus on supporting patients and staff during the process of discovering, preventing and correcting errors. Read more.