News Release

Patient Safety Conference To Report Reductions In Health Care Errors

Meeting Announcement

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

RANCHO MIRAGE, CA, October 14, 1998 Health care should become safer for Americans based on research and pilot projects to be presented November 8-10, 1998 during a patient safety conference at the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, the National Patient Safety Foundation at the AMA, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are convening the conference.

Keynoting the conference will be the president of the Boston-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Donald M. Berwick, MD. He served on the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Healthcare Industry. Also speaking will be Virginia A. Sharpe, PhD, author of the recently published Medical Harm: Historical, Conceptual and Ethical Dimensions of Iatrogenic Illness.

A conference panel on a Denver criminal trial involving three nurses and a medication error will include the prosecuting attorney, a defense attorney and a hospital representative. Another panel including medical and consumer representatives will address controversies surrounding the Pap smear screening test for cervical cancer. The conference will also explore the development and usefulness of comprehensive error databases, expected to be a significant source of future error reductions.

Additional support for the conference is coming from the American Hospital Association, Pfizer Inc., Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc., the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists Research and Education Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The conference follows a pathbreaking patient safety meeting held at the Annenberg Center in October 1996.

To review the agenda, click here (Microsoft Word format.)

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