Still Not Safe, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
Still Not Safe, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe
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Still Not Safe
Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine

Author: Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Robert L. Wears

Narrator: Mike Lenz

Unabridged: 7 hr 12 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/02/2020


Synopsis

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient-safety movement—and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization. Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem: the rise in medical litigation and physicians' aversion to risk; institutional changes in the organization and control of healthcare; and a bureaucratic movement to "rationalize" medical practice—to make a hospital run like a factory.

If these social factors challenged the place of practitioners, then the patient-safety movement provided a means for readjustment. In spite of relatively constant rates of medical errors in the preceding decades, the "epidemic" was announced in 1999 with the publication of the Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human; the reforms that followed came to be dominated by the very professions it set out to reform.


About Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University with appointments in the Carey Business School, School of Medicine, and the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality. She was named Researcher of the Year and has served on a National Academy of Science panel to assess the resilience of the Department of Homeland Security.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Reed

A very interesting review of the patient safety movement and how it has been transformed over the past 30 years from an advocacy for reform to a bureaucratic cataloging of numbers and events hoping to find a "cause" in the process. According to the authors, the workplace, especially in healthcare is......more

Goodreads review by Myrtede

Great accounting of the patient safety movement in the US.......more

Goodreads review by Roxanne

Helpful context and history of this movement. Could have edited down the recommendations piece because that seemed fairly straightforward.......more

Goodreads review by Paul

Fantastic challenge to the patient safety orthodoxy Important read for anyone involved in safety and Improvment. Describes how past efforts have been hampered by rigid thinking and an undereliance on psychology and engineering......more