High Reliability Essay

Two Institute of Medicine Reports—To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System (1999) and Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (2001)—highlighted the serious problem of preventable errors and deaths in the U.S. health care system. These reports estimate that medical errors cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars annually. The reports’ main conclusions are that a majority of medical errors are not the fault of a particular individual or group; rather, errors are caused by faulty systems, processes, and conditions that lead people to make mistakes, or fail to prevent them. Preventable harm events in hospitals could be reduced to near-zero if Health care organizations adapted the High Reliability imperatives
What distinguishes the concept of “high reliability” is not a specific organizational structure, but rather the single-minded focus by the entire workforce on identifying potential problems and high-risk situations before they lead to an adverse event (Chassin and Loeb, “High-Reliabilty Health Care: Getting There from Here” 461). High Reliability Organizations (HROs), in general, are those organizations where harm prevention and process improvement are second nature to all in the
The imperatives are linked together to support and enable one another. At the foundation of an HRO are people—patients and staff—who deserve utmost respect and support. This necessitates a patient-centered culture with transparency and patient engagement, a common knowledge base and capacity for frontline teamwork, and innovative visionary leaders with the skills necessary to foster positive change and reduce adverse or fatal events to