Re-framing patient safety

Though medical harm is prevalent nationwide, advocates struggle to increase awareness about patient safety risks and spark support for effective solutions. The Betsy Lehman Center partnered with FrameWorks Institute to change how people think and talk about this important public health issue.

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