To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System

Excerpt

Medical errors are a leading cause of preventable harm in human health care, claiming tens of thousands of lives each year and imposing profound human and economic costs. Decades of research show that most errors do not result from bad professionals but from unsafe systems that fail to support safe care and transparent learning.

Veterinary medicine faces many of the same challenges, often with fewer formal reporting structures and additional barriers such as nonverbal patients and fragmented data. In both fields, fear of blame and liability continues to limit open reporting and shared learning.

This open source publications page brings together key human and veterinary resources on patient safety and incident reporting. Its goal is to support a culture of transparency, system improvement, and shared learning across disciplines so that safer care becomes the standard for every patient.

To Err Is Human

Institute of Medicine. To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. National Academy Press. 2000.

First in a series of publications from the Quality of Health Care in America, a project initiated by the Institute of Medicine

Copyright 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.