Changing health care culture: a prerequisite to improving patient safety

Abstract

Saeed Azizi, Faisal Siddiqui, Ithsham Iqbal Faculty of Medicine, St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, UKWe read the recent article by Chua et al1 with great interest. We found it thought-provoking to read how novel interventions, such as sharing errors, among the team can reduce the frequency of error recurrence in the future. We are hopeful that if such interventions were applied to other areas of health care, it would yield similar results. Having said this, we strongly believe that an important prerequisite of openness among health care workers is required for such interventions to work. View the original paper by Chua et al 

Keywords

• Healthcare culture
• hierarchy
• patient safety
• errors