President Clinton calls for a culture of
conversion to promote patient safety in healthcare.
President Bill Clinton, 42nd President of the United States,
headlined day two of the 10th Annual World Patient Safety, Science
& Technology Summit, presented by the Patient Safety Movement
Foundation (PSMF).
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Joe Kiani, founder of the Patient Safety
Movement Foundation, discusses efforts to improve patient safety
worldwide with former President Bill Clinton at the 10th Annual
World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit in Newport
Beach, California. (Photo: Business Wire)
As a long-time advocate of patient safety, President Clinton
spoke of the need to develop what he termed a “culture of
conversion,” where more people within healthcare feel empowered to
implement proven practices for eliminating preventable harm within
hospitals.
“We know enough right now to cut the current problem by half or
more,” he said. “One of the biggest problems you have in every big,
complicated society is that there’s an incredibly built-in
resistance to being the second, third, fourth, or 100th person to
do the same thing, even though it’s been proven to work. Which is
exactly the reverse of what we should be doing.”
Reflecting on his time in office during the 1990s, President
Clinton said that we could learn much from the example of former
South African President Nelson Mandela when it comes to uniting
people behind a common cause for good.
“Everyone wants to believe they have some piece to add to life’s
great puzzle,” he said. “You need converts to do anything big, and
we’ve got to get more zealous converts. Nelson Mandela was a genius
at this. He was the best I ever saw. He never tried to make people
feel bad for what they hadn’t done. He tried to make people feel
good about what they could do.”
Having long been a campaigner on the dangers of the opioid
epidemic and a supporter of the PSMF since its inception, President
Clinton suggested that it is important to focus on collaborating
for future good rather than blaming and shaming when it comes to
medical errors.
“No one wants to see innocent people die, and very few are
hard-hearted enough not to care,” he said. “You don’t have to save
everybody; you just have to save everybody that you can.”
Dr. Michael Ramsay, chief executive officer of the PSMF, told
the audience that there is much cause for optimism when it comes to
meeting the target of zero preventable deaths by 2030. “I think
there’s a future now to patient safety,” he said. “I think things
are going to start happening remarkably fast. Technology is
changing, we’re gathering more data, and we’ve got more and more
people involved in this movement.”
Jeremy Hunt, chancellor of the exchequer of the United Kingdom,
delivered a video message to the Summit in which he applauded the
difference made by the PSMF over the last decade. “We now have the
World Health Organization doing an annual World Patient Safety Day,
a 10-year plan to reduce preventable deaths, and we had a
ministerial summit this year in Montreux in Switzerland with more
than 100 countries represented. We’re making great progress, but
there’s a lot of work to do. Even one preventable death is too
many. We should be aiming for zero.”
Following on from President Clinton’s remarks about creating the
right culture for change within healthcare, Anthony Staines,
patient safety program director, Fédération des hôpitaux vaudois,
Switzerland, described the need to address the failings of
implementation science, a topic also addressed in a talk from
Francisco Valero-Cuevas, a professor at the University of Southern
California.
“There are many prevention and mitigation solutions, but they
are only partly and unsystematically applied,” said Staines.
“Science has brought us an expanding body of knowledge. The trouble
is that it does not reach the patients.”
There were additional talks from Peter Ziese, chief medical
officer at Philips, and Michelle Schreiber of the Centers for
Medicare & Medicaid Services. Schreiber told the audience that
while healthcare throughout the United States has made significant
improvements in patient safety, the pandemic illustrated how our
systems are still not durable and resilient enough for times of
stress, and gaps in care and infrastructure continue to
persist.
Mike Durkin and Sanaz Massoumi, chairman and chief operating
officer of the PSMF respectively, gave addresses, and panel
discussion topics included the media’s role in covering patient
safety, opioid safety, and steps that can be taken in the journey
to zero harm. Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, secretary of foreign affairs
of Mexico, received the Joe Kiani Humanitarian Award for his work
in patient safety.
Finally, Kiani, founder of the PSMF, reflected on a decade of
achievement and the path forward. “We started as a grassroots
organization, and the grassroots movement has done so much,” he
said. “I think our next step is to demand our elected officials to
hardwire patient safety into our system and align the incentives so
that every hospital puts evidence-based practices in place.”
ABOUT THE PATIENT SAFETY MOVEMENT FOUNDATION
In 2012, Joe Kiani founded the non-profit Patient Safety
Movement Foundation (PSMF) to eliminate preventable medical errors
in hospitals. His team worked with patient safety experts from
around the world to create Actionable Evidence-Based Practices
(AEBP) that address the top challenges. The AEBP are available
without charge to hospitals online. Hospitals are encouraged to
make a formal commitment to ZERO preventable deaths, and healthcare
technology companies are asked to sign the Open Data Pledge to
share their data so that predictive algorithms that can identify
errors before they become fatal can be developed. The Foundation's
annual World Patient Safety, Science & Technology Summit brings
together all stakeholders, including patients, healthcare
providers, medical technology companies, government employers, and
private payers. The PSMF was established through the support of the
Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation, and Competition in
Healthcare. For more information, please visit psmf.org.
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Patient Safety Movement Foundation Irene Mulonni,
irene@mulonni.com | (858) 859-7001