Joint Commission leaders call for high reliability in hospitals

Too many hospitals and healthcare leaders currently experience serious safety failures as routine and inevitable parts of daily work, according to an article published last week in The Milbank Quarterly. In the article, authors Mark R. Chassin, MD, FACP, MPP, MPH, president and CEO of The Joint Commission; and Jerod M. Loeb, PhD, executive vice president for healthcare quality evaluation at The Joint Commission, urge hospitals to make the substantial changes necessary to achieve the ultimate goal of zero patient harm by adapting lessons from high-risk industries.

To prevent the harm that results from failures, which affects millions of Americans each year, Chassin and Loeb offer a framework for major changes involving leadership, safety culture and robust process improvement. The framework is designed to help hospitals make progress toward high reliability—defined as extremely high levels of safety maintained over long periods of time, and comparable to levels demonstrated by the commercial air travel and nuclear power industries, among others.