Presidential advisers push White House to prioritize patient safety

The White House should create a national patient safety team to help reduce high levels of dangerous care in the medical system, presidential advisers recommended on Sept. 8.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is urging the White House to form a patient safety team to help reduce high levels of dangerous care in the US medical system. In a report released last week, the group suggested that President Joe Biden should appoint a coordinator to work across multiple government agencies. The initiative should include a multidisciplinary patient safety team, according to the document.

Ideally, the group would focus on medication prescription errors and hospital-acquired infections. The group said progress on those areas has been “unacceptably slow,” and urged the White House to step in.

The president should appoint a safety coordinator to work across government agencies, as well as a multidisciplinary patient safety team, the report said. The White House should create non-binding recommendations for state and federal agencies. The advisors also want President Biden to require federal health agencies to pinpoint high-priority patient safety issues, evidence-based practices and mitigation strategies, and a plan for patient safety research. 

“It should be the policy of the Biden-Harris Administration, through both federal action and public-private partnership, to immediately, dramatically, measurably and continually reduce healthcare-associated injuries to patients and workplace injuries to the healthcare workforce,” the advisors stated in their report.

Leah Binder, president and CEO of The Leapfrog Group, which is a watchdog for patient safety, was pleased with the advisors for putting “a priority on one of the most devastating issues in American healthcare,” Fierce Healthcare reported.

One in 4 people who use Medicare and were hospitalized during one month in 2018, and 43% of those incidents were preventable, according to federal health inspectors. During the second year of the pandemic, preventable hospital-acquired infections went up, a federal analysis found.