Book Review

Excerpt

This book was written by two UCSF internists who are experienced in and committed to medical quality and patient safety improvement. The rhetoric and content vacillates between muckraking to scholarly analysis. Along with the sensationalism comes a quite thorough and well-organized treatment of the recent history and theoretical underpinnings of the patient safety movement in the United States during the past decade or so. Many of the most prominent scholars and advocates for medical quality and safety both in and out of the field are mentioned and a few are profiled in detail. These include Berwick, Leape, Gawande, Reason, Tversky, Brennan, and Bosk. The trends, events, and personalities leading up to the now famous 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report titled “To Err Is Human” are analyzed and described. The authors note that none of the factual material contained in the IOM report was new. The same epidemiological observations and estimates had all been published previously and the IOM group repackaged them. The authors also point out the irony that stories about deaths from medical errors resonated strongly with the lay press while at the same time more fundamental issues of healthcare quality and utilization never gained as much traction. …