Still Not Safe: Patient Safety and the Middle-Managing of American Medicine

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.

About the Author :
Robert L. Wears (1947-2017) was professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida and visiting professor in the Clinical Safety Research Unit at Imperial College London. His research focused on technical work studies, joint cognitive systems, and understanding the nature of safety and resilience in complex socio-technical systems, including medicine and healthcare. Kathleen M. Sutcliffe is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Business and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor Emerita of Business Administration at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. She was named Researcher of the Year and has served on a National Academy of Science panel to assess the resilience of the Department of Homeland Security. Mike Lenz has been an audiobook narrator and voice actor for more than fourteen years. Having narrated titles in genres ranging from fiction, entertainment, science, and children's literature to Christian, business, self-help, and history, Mike loves bringing nonfiction and fiction stories to life with his engaging, confident, and trustworthy voice. Mike's broad background includes voicing commercials, eLearning projects, real estate videos, corporate and web-based videos, and brand imaging, appearing in regional and national television commercials as an on-camera talent, and serving as the mayor of his hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York. Mike is also a Voice Arts Award-nominated podcast producer as well as an author. He is a frequent speaker at learning and voice-over conferences. Mike currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, with his wife and four children.