The Hastings Center announces the publication of Promoting Patient Safety: An Ethical Basis for Policy Deliberation

This document is the final report of a two-year research project launched in response to the landmark IOM report on medical error, To Err Is Human.  Promoting Patient Safety seeks to foster clearer and better discussion of the ethical concerns that are integral to the development and implementation of sound and effective policies to address the problem of medical error. It is intended for policymakers, patient safety advocates, health care administrators, clinicians, lawyers, ethicists, educators, and others involved in designing and maintaining safety policies and practices within health care institutions.  Among the topics discussed in this report:
 

	The values, principles, and obligations underlying patient safety efforts.
	The tensions between "individual" and "system" accountability, between error "reporting" and error "disclosure," and between overall safety improvement within institutions and the rights and welfare of individual patients in these institutions.
	The practical implications of defining "responsibility" retrospectively, as praise or blame for past events, or prospectively, as it relates to professional obligations and goals.
	The shortcomings of tort liability as a means of building cultures of safety, learning from error, encouraging truth telling, or compensating patients and families, contrasted with alternative models of dispute resolution, including mediation and no-fault liability.
	The needs of patients, families, and clinicians affected by harmful errors and how these needs may be addressed within systems approaches to patient safety.
	The potential conflicts between the protection of patient privacy required by HIPAA and efforts to use patient data for the purposes of safety improvement, and how these conflicts may be resolved.

This research project was made possible through a major grant from the Patrick and Catherine Weldon Donaghue Medical Research Foundation.

The report may be downloaded at http://www.thehastingscenter.org/pdf/patient_safety.pdf.  It is also beingpublished as a special supplement to the September-October issue of the Hastings Center Report.  To order additional copies of this publication, contact Susan Eckert at eckerts@thehastingscenter.org.

Ann Mellor
Administrative Assistant
For: Nancy Berlinger & Daniel Callahan & Angela Wasunna
The Hastings Center
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Garrison, New York 10524-5555
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Website - www.thehastingscenter.org