Abstract:
Medical errors and issues of patient safety are hardly new phenomena. Even during
the dawn of medicine, Hippocrates counselled new physicians “to above all else do
no harm.” In the United States, efforts to improve the quality of healthcare can be
seen in almost every decade of the last century. In the early 1900s, Dr. Ernest Codman
failed in his efforts to get fellow surgeons to look at the outcomes of their cases.
In the 1970s, there was an outcry that the military allowed an almost blind surgeon
to continue to practice and even transferred him to the prestigious Walter Reed Hospital.
More recently, two reports by the Institute of Medicine caught the attention of the
media, the American public, and the healthcare industry. To Err Is Human highlights the need to reduce medical errors and improve patient safety, and Crossing The Quality Chasm calls for a new health system to provide quality care for the 21st century.
