Patient Safety Quotes

Let's make the best use of technology to work for patient safety as well as to fight the rising problem of non-communicable diseases, a big challenge to our country and the world.

It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.

The Government wouldn't force cancer on anyone. Instead it should be seeking volunteers ... We will accept Americans who are healthy and 18 years or older ... Children are needed to fill important quotas in such categories as childhood leukemia ... If you believe the "negligible risk" standard is acceptable, you can sign up for the National Cancer Volunteer Registry today and adopt the chemical of your choice.

Americans broadly consent to funding clinical research because they believe in the promise of medical research. But people support scientific work only if they trust that it serves societal interests, respects patient dignity and operates with guardrails.

I like being on the side of healthcare consumer.

Many family planning clinics and - and programs that service women have refused now to take women's - United State's money because they feel that it would be unethical, and it could injure their clients even more, their patients even more. That has to be changed.

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.

I'm a veteran. If I go into the V.A. hospital in Tennessee, I want to know that the procedures they're doing to me are being done properly. That is not unreasonable.

The Food and Drug Administration works to protect the interests of all patients and provide them with reliable information about the potential effects of treatments. But government rules should not stand in the way of potentially lifesaving therapies for those who do not have much time or any other options.

Whether it's possible or not, being a doctor, you take an oath. To care for your patient, not to kill them. You take an oath to do things that are proper in the medical world. Not to administer something outside of a hospital setting that's not even your area.

One of the things that made Epic strong when I wrote the original code was that it never occurred to me to do anything other than put the patient at the center. I developed a clinical system at a time when the health care world had pretty much only billing and lab systems available.

A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide.

I have seen good nurses and bad nurses. They existed along a continuum: from hard-working, kind and competent people, to office-hugging, bone-idle types, to apathetic, disengaged automatons.

We are spending most of our time in American health care fixing the mistakes that either we in the profession are causing or our patients are, without recognizing it, causing to themselves.

Nurse: "Doctor, the man you just gave a clean bill of health to dropped dead right as he was leaving the office". Doctor: "Turn him around, make it look like he was walking in."

I've had at least a couple botched surgeries.

In the first speech I delivered as health secretary, I made one thing perfectly clear: we need a cultural shift in the NHS: from a culture responsive mainly to orders from the top down to one responsive to patients, in which patient safety is put first.

A resident's surgical skill is judged by their technique and speed. You can't be sloppy, and you can't be slow.

This warning from the New York City Department of Health Fraud: Be suspicious of any doctor who tries to take your temperature with his finger.

There is a pervasive lack of accountability in medicine that extends from the most newly qualified doctor right through the most senior professors.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less.

The best surgeon, like best general, is he who makes the fewest mistakes.

This is the reality of intensive care: at any point, we are as apt to harm as we are to heal.

The 2 million people who work in the NHS and social care are also themselves patients and users. I know they all want to treat patients and users the way they and their families would want to be treated and that is the purpose of our reforms.