Even though medical harm is prevalent nationwide, experts and advocates struggle to increase awareness about patient safety risks and spark support for effective solutions. The Betsy Lehman Center is partnering with FrameWorks Institute — a D.C.-based nonprofit that uses research to shape public discourse on social and scientific issues — to change how people think and talk about this important public health issue.

Key takeaways

There is a noticeable gap between the way experts think about how best to improve the safety of health care and the understanding of the general public — and many health care professionals — about the challenges and solutions to the problem of medical error across the country.

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. These commonly-held assumptions lead to a consistent underestimation of the problem of safety, impede public engagement with large scale solutions, and ultimately inhibit improvements in patient safety.

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

Two metaphors are particularly productive ways to talk about patient safety:

The aviation metaphor helps explain how medical errors arise and how they can be reduced.
The fail-safe metaphor is useful when people are trying to grasp what solutions might look like.