Publications

The rationale behind the need for organisational excellence in healthcare. Transforming from good to excellent is not easy. If it were easy, every organisation would be great for treating all patients’ population, and as we know, few are. Most healthcare organisations are very good, but very good isn’t good enough. We don’t accept airlines being 99.99 per cent accident free in their landings, and we can’t accept that in healthcare either. The Institute of Medicine’s To Error Is Human report estimated as many as 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year as a result of medical errors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has estimated for every person who dies from a hospital error or an infection, five to 10 others suffer a non-fatal infection. The Institute estimated the cost of all these medical errors at over US$20 billion annually. “With approximately 33.3 million hospitalisations in the U.S. each year, that means as many as 88 people out of every 1,000 will suffer injury or illness, and perhaps six of them will die as a result.”