Why Does the U.S. Need a National Patient Safety Board? [Webinar]

The Institute of Medicine’s groundbreaking report, To Err is Human, was published 20 years ago and spurred a vigorous effort to improve patient safety, but preventable medical errors still cause an estimated 250,000 deaths a year in the United States, making this problem the third-leading cause of death. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic has put the healthcare workforce in crisis, and safety is suffering.

Well-intentioned efforts to improve processes and change behavior in the healthcare industry have been decentralized and resulted in minimal improvements, says Karen Wolk Feinstein, Ph.D. The failure can be traced, in part, to the lack of a single federal agency that investigates healthcare errors and identifies ways to prevent them, she says.

Dr. Feinstein is spearheading the creation of a proposed federal independent agency, the National Patient Safety Board (NPSB), modeled in part after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, that would identify and anticipate significant harm in healthcare; provide expertise to study the context and causes of harm and solutions; and create solutions to prevent patient safety events from occurring.

This idea is fully supported by Ken Segel, as he has discussed in this blog post. He will join Dr. Feinstein for the discussion.

In December, legislation was introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives: H.R.9377 – the National Patient Safety Board Act.

Learning Objectives

This session will cover topics including:

• The inspiration provided by the late Paul O'Neill, Sr.
• What progress have we seen on patient safety in the past 20 years? Why haven't we seen more?
• How can we spread proven approaches for preventing harm?
• Why create another new agency, the NPSB?
• What models were used to formulate the NPSB?
• What coalition have you formed to support the NPSB, and how can attendees help?

You'll be able to ask our expert panelists live questions about this legislation, the NPSB, and patient safety in general.