Error Reduction, Patient Safety and Institutional Ethics Committees

Institutional ethics committees remain largely absent from the literature on error reduction and patient safety. This paper attempts to fill the gap. Healthcare professionals are on the front lines in the defense against medical error, but the changes that are needed to reduce medical errors and enhance patient safety are cultural and systemic in nature. As noted in the Hastings Centers recent report, Promoting Patient Safety, the occurrence of medical error involves a complex web of multiple factors. Human misstep is certainly one such factor, but not the only one. In this paper, I build on the Hasting Centers report on patient safety in arguing that institutional ethics committees ought to play an integral role in the transformation of a culture of blame to a culture of safety in healthcare delivery.