Leadership Accountability For Patient Safety: From Theory to Practice

This symposium focuses on a subset of challenges in healthcare such as legislative and regulatory changes; reforms to financial reimbursement practices; shifting patient population health, demographics, and expectations; workforce challenges, and increasing transparency around the safety and quality of care processes and outcomes. Specifically, three papers target a refined understanding of the nature of effective leadership for patient safety across levels of the organization. It begins with a description of a parsimonious model of leadership accountability for safety including three mechanisms by which to affect change in an organization. The second paper discusses the themes emerged from a qualitative field study with management teams from each level of eleven hospitals. In the last paper, the development and evaluation of a novel simulation (or war gaming) approach to engaging executive leaders in safety related developing activities was presented. In sum, we introduce an overview of patient safety fr...