Welcome

Welcome to A Word on Quality and Safety.  As the title suggests, the focus of this blog will be on improving the quality and safety of health care for patients.  My goal is to have regular posts that focus on one word and how that word relates to quality and patient safety.  I will also include periodic updates focused on timely topics related to the improvement of value in health care.  The focus will be how quality and safety impacts patients and patient care, but there will be a broad range of topics that are more loosely associated with that topic.

I have done some "guest blogging" in the past and blogged on issues related to osteopathic medical education, at blOGME:  Osteopathic Graduate Medical Education Blog.  I have been blessed with many wonderful mentors throughout my career and many worthwhile clinical, educational, and administrative experiences in the field of quality and safety.  I have also benefited a great deal from the wisdom of many other wonderful writers in the quality and safety blogosphere.  I have wanted start a blog focusing on quality and safety for some time as it is a passion and where I spend most of my professional efforts.

Why blog?  It is admittedly a mix of selfish and altruistic desires.  I selfishly would like to spend more time writing and sharing my thoughts.  It is often that I read something or see a tweet that spurs a different or complementary angle on a particular subject.  Blogging provides a forum for time-sensitive, semi-formal writing and the ability to share my spin on the topic at hand.  Altruistically, I believe there is room in the current world of health care quality and safety for different perspectives.  Hopefully these discussions will lead to improved care for patients.

I would consider my sight line to be patient-centered pragmatism.  What does that mean?  I try to see the world from a patient's perspective - or at least appreciate that their perspective is many times different than the health care provider.  Pragmatism signifies that I'm more interested in getting something positive done than fixing everything at once.  While I am always striving for perfection and I'm rarely content with the status quo, I understand that incremental change has its advantages over no change.

The aim is for A Word on Quality and Safety to add to the collective wisdom and improve the care for both individual patients and populations of patients.  I hope that you enjoy what you read and learn something along the way.