Improving patient safety requires a collaborative effort from all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare providers, medical technology companies, government, employers, and private payers. The Patient Safety Movement Foundation works with all stakeholders to address the problems and solutions of patient safety.
Preventable medical errors lead to more than 200,000 deaths in US hospitals every year leading to $1.44 trillion in excess healthcare costs.
Below are some patient safety reference items and documents we hope you will find helpful. We continue to grow our resources so please feel free to contact us with any additional information or patient safety update materials that could be helpful to the Patient Safety Movement. Together we can get to ZERO preventable deaths.
Patient Safety Movement Foundation Resources
If You’ve Been Harmed
If you or a loved one has been harmed seeking medical care we’ve designed a website, ifyouvebeenharmed.org, to help you navigate steps that can help you get the answers you’re seeking, to ensure this doesn’t happen to anyone else, ever again.
Simple checklists patients’ families can use to support their loved one’s hospital care and help prevent Never Events, including infections, falls, medication errors, bed sores, blood clots, surgery complications and pneumonia.
Advice from a Patient is a collection of insights from patients or caregivers written as a reminder to healthcare professionals of the aspects of care that are important to different patients. Diane S. Hopkins was one of the first Chief Experience Officers in the U.S and Haley Scott DeMaria survived injuries from a devastating bus crash when she was a member of the University of Notre Dame swim team. The two have teamed up to blend their unique long-term perspectives on the little and big things that are important to provide safe, compassionate and relevant care for each individual. This book is a great option for book club learning for healthcare teams.
No matter whether you are a clinician, support professional, patient, survivor or advocate, Advocacy Heals U will reach you in ways you will not expect, which is why this book has seven pages of endorsements. Every person will go through an Event that will leave them stunned; the Need becomes apparent; the Advocacy will lead to strength and healing!
Donna Helen Crisp, a nurse ethicist, went into surgery expecting to go home the next morning. Because of multiple medical errors, she spent weeks in a coma on an ICU ventilator and underwent four additional surgeries. When the hospital refused to comment, she spent years searching for – and finding – the truth of what happened to her. As a nurse, teacher, lawyer, and patient, Crisp wrote Anatomy of Medical Errors: The Patient in Room 2 to give voice to a national conversation about improving medical care in hospitals.
A well-written study of one person’s experience at the hands of the most exalted research hospital in our country. Big healthcare brands don’t mean that you will get the most expert care or humane treatment.
1/3 of all patients are accidentally harmed by hospital care. Author, Karen Curtiss, learned this the hard way — “If I’d had Safe & Sound in the Hospital, my dad would be alive today.” With quick checklists, simple forms and clever pull-out tools, you will know how to help get safe & sound hospital care for the people you love. Make sure everyone in your family has a copy! (It’s a better gift than flowers for someone in the hospital, too!)
The Story: Every day in the United States an estimated 550 people die from preventable medical errors, which is approximately 200,000 people a year, making it the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States (Healthgrades 2004). On April 14, my mom, Louise Batz, went to have knee replacement surgery. That night, a medical error caused Mom to sustain an injury from which she could not recover. She lost her life eleven days later. The Mission: The mission of the Louise H. Batz Patient Safety Foundation is to help prevent medical errors by ensuring that patients and families have the knowledge they need to promote a safe hospital experience for their loved ones and to support innovative advancements in patient safety.
Brian Boyle tells a personal story of his fight back from near death after a horrific automobile accident. He focuses on his experience as a patient who, while in a two-month long medically induced coma, was unable to move or talk to anyone around him, yet he was able to hear, see and feel pain. Brian slowly clawed his way back to the living and found the strength to live to tell his story in his acclaimed memoir, Iron Heart.
The Savvy Diabetic: A Survival Guide is a collection of tips, tools, and techniques, borne out of experiences and mistakes and lots of on-the-job learning. After 43 years as a Type 1 diabetic, Joanne Laufer Milo had successfully and deliberately avoided hospitals. She was suddenly confronted with her worst fears: an emergency appendectomy 3000 miles away from my home. She was terrified of losing the control of her diabetes which she had worked so hard to maintain. Five years later and several more hospitalizations and doctors’ appointments, as well as many experiences with travel and life, Laufer Milo wanted to share what she has learned, hoping her insights and experiences will help you to ~ Live well and in balance with diabetes ~ Survive the medical system as a person with diabetes ~ Feel validated in your feelings about this disease ~ Have more tools to help support someone you love who has diabetes ~ Smile and even laugh about your own experiences.
Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market.
Your Patient Safety Survival Guide by Dr. Gretchen LeFever Watson shows us how to make hospitals and care facilities safer. This book provides key safety habits for people to recognize so they can be sure hospital staff use them during every patient encounter. It includes concrete steps and actual scripts patients and families can use to become more effective advocates for their own safety. The book also explains how addressing the most common safety problems will set the stage for tackling other issues, including healthcare’s role in the overuse of opiate painkillers and its related heroin epidemic.
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