Key takeaways
Experts and the public think differently about patient safety. There is a noticeable gap between experts and the general public, as well as many health care professionals, about the challenges and solutions to the problem of medical error across the country.
Commonly-held assumptions stand in the way. People have difficulty understanding patient safety challenges because of the way they think about medicine — including human error, the role of systems in health outcomes and decision-making.
When communicating about patient safety, organizations and advocates need to:
- Explicitly define terms like 'patient safety' and 'medical errors.'
- Connect the dots between causes of errors and solutions.
- Explain rather than assert the prevalence of medical errors.
- Adopt a constructive rather than a crisis tone.
- Include the whole picture, rather than zooming in on one cause or solution
