One of the challenges for an association like ASA is making decisions that are in the best interests of each of our 53,000-plus members, many of whom are highly specialized and have far-ranging and disparate interests. But there’s one area in which all anesthesiologists share a unified focus: patient safety. Having been involved in health care administration since the late 1970s, I can attest to the fact that the specialty’s reputation as the safety leader is very real and widely recognized. It is an aspect of the specialty’s culture that is “baked in” in a fashion that is unique in medicine.
It’s hard to believe that just four or five decades ago, “patient safety” didn’t even exist as a specific area of concern. It was the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report To Err Is Human, published in 1999, that brought the issue of patient safety to the attention...
