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Ann Thorac Surg 2005;79:11-15
© 2005 The Society of Thoracic Surgeons

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Editorial

Focus on Patient Safety: Good News for the Practicing Surgeon

^a Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
^b Safety System Group, Peterborough, New Hampshire
^c Dartmouth Medical School, Dartmouth, New Hampshire, USA

^* Address reprint requests to Dr Sundt, Division of Cardiovascular Surgery, Mayo Clinic, 200 First St SW, Rochester, MN55905 (E-mail: sundt.thoralf@mayo.edu).

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The term "patient safety" is omnipresent; purchasers are asking for data, the government is passing legislation, and an increasing number of society meetings—the Southern Thoracic Surgical Association, and The Society of Thoracic Surgeons among them—are featuring speakers on the subject. While the fervor for this cause may seem to threaten to impose yet another bureaucratic burden upon a profession already under siege, it is in fact good news for the practicing surgeon. This editorial, written on behalf of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) Workforce on Patient Advocacy, Communication and Safety, is intended to explain why Thoracic Surgeons should not only take notice, but take charge of this movement.

Patient safety gained national attention in 1999 with the publication of the Institute of Medicine report "To Err is Man: Building a Safer Healthcare System," which estimated that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans die each year of potentially preventable medical mistakes [1]. This study was met with criticism both for it's apparent hind sighted certainty [2] as well as methodological flaws that could have rendered these numbers several-fold too high or, for that matter, too low [3, 4]. Regardless of the exact count, however, we have certainly all witnessed medical error. Indeed many of us have experienced it either ourselves or with family members. We must accept that there is substantial evidence of, at minimum, thousands of deaths annually as a result of medical error in the United States [1, 5, 6].

How then are we to respond to the challenge from the public to address this problem? The good news is that the current focus on patient safety in fact provides thoracic surgeons leverage to take the next step in doing what we have always done—lead the way in improving the quality . . . [Full Text of this Article]