Achieving health equity: A patient safety imperative
Abstract
Achieving health equity requires achieving zero preventable harm for all people. Health inequity must be inextricably linked to safety if all people are to be free from harm. There is no safety without equity and no equity without safety. Health inequity is an unsafe condition. Equity-related near misses, adverse events and sentinel events must undergo a comprehensive systematic analysis. Each root cause should have a strong corrective action(s). Measurable actions might include the collection and stratification of race, ethnicity and language data, or addressing stereotype bias, implicit bias, structural competency and institutional and structural racism. Leadership committed to creating a culture of equity is required. Measures of success should be linked to payment and restoring trust.
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Ronald Wyatt , MD MHA, Founder and CEO of Achieving Health Equity, LLC., and a Senior Fellow IHI. He is an internationally known equity, safety and quality expert. Dr Wyatt was the first co-chair of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Equity Advisory Group and is faculty for the IHI Pursuing Equity Initiative. After serving as the Medical Director for the US Defense Health Agency/Military Health System Patient Safety Analysis Center, he became the first medical director of The Joint Commission (TJC) Office of Quality and Patient Safety and the first patient safety officer for The Joint Commission. While at TJC, Dr Wyatt led the team that wrote the Patient Safety Systems Chapter, contributed to sentinel event alerts and created the Quick Safety publication. He served as technical adviser on the RCA2 document that has been widely adopted as a guide to completing a root cause analysis. Currently, Dr Wyatt is faculty/ adviser/coach on multiple health equity collaboratives.
Citation
Wyatt, Ronald (2023, September 1). Achieving health equity: A patient safety imperative. In the Management in Healthcare: A Peer-Reviewed Journal, Volume 8, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.69554/UAIZ5083.
Publications LLP