Still Not Safe

Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine

By: Robert L. Wears, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

Narrated by: Mike Lenz

Still Not Safe is the story of the rise of the patient - safety movement - and how an "epidemic" of medical errors was derived from a reality that didn't support such a characterization.

Physician Robert Wears and organizational theorist Kathleen Sutcliffe trace the origins of patient safety to the emergence of market trends that challenged the place of doctors in the larger medical ecosystem: the rise in medical litigation and physicians' aversion to risk; institutional changes in the organization and control of healthcare; and a bureaucratic movement to "rationalize" medical practice-to make a hospital run like a factory.

If these social factors challenged the place of practitioners, then the patient-safety movement provided a means for readjustment. In spite of relatively constant rates of medical errors in the preceding decades, the "epidemic" was announced in 1999 with the publication of the Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human; the reforms that followed came to be dominated by the very professions it set out to reform.

©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 Tantor

Among the best healthcare books I’ve read

This book connected a lot of disparate threads I’d recognized previously but never put together. In doing so, it helped me better understand the ongoing safety problem in healthcare and what real progress here might look like.