Tellens

Patient Safety

100,000 Americans die in hospitals every year from preventable medical errors, a number equal to the crash of a jumbo jet every day.

“Thirty years ago in healthcare the fact that there were errors in practice was something we knew about. We frankly thought of them as the cost of doing business, that stuff happens, you know. That we’re in a very highly complex environment, we have very fragile patients, so things happen.” — James Conway, Sr Vice President, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

For the Patient Safety Education Project, Tellens documented tragic, but all-too-common experiences of patients and caregivers in order to change the way everyone, from policy makers to those on the frontlines of care, thinks about medical errors.

In A Vision for Patient Safety, Dr. Lucien Leape, pioneer in the field of patient safety, calls for a national commitment, like the one that put a man on the moon, to make medicine safe for all Americans.

“Perfect performance is possible. Medicine’s never believed that. We have always believed that errors, like the poor, are always with you. And what we’re saying here is ‘No, we can achieve perfection.’ We can achieve absolutely safe care, but you certainly can’t achieve it if you don’t believe it, and if you don’t try.” — Lucien Leape, MD,
Harvard School of Public Health

Reviews

“An important feature of the PSEP Curriculum is its use of trigger tapes to engage learning.... They received high praise.”

“Situations shown in the tapes were extremely real and relevant to actual medical practice.”

For more information, go to www.patientsafetyeducationproject.org.