It's Patient Safety Awareness Week 2025

I have a number of rules that cross my mind often. Rule #3 is: There is no medical condition that cannot be made worse. A fancier way to say this is in the Hippocratic Oath: primum non nocere. This is Latin for first do no harm or what we now just call iatrogenic harm, which means "relating to a physician or medical treatment." This, of course, brings us back to Rule #3 and the fact that Patient Safety Awareness Week is under way.

National Patient Safety Awareness Week was established in 2002 and followed by the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005. The act was signed into law in order to reduce medical errors and increase patient safety. This was the result of an increasing recognition of the iatrogenic harm (Rule #3) that was being imposed upon patients in the health care system. One of the main goals was to reduce medical errors by establishing a "culture of safety" which promotes learning from patient safety events. These learnings could happen in a protected way while also assuring accountability and appropriate transparency.

The Awareness part of this week is the key in many ways. We do not have pro-con debates about whether we support patient safety – we all do. But we're not always aware of the things we do or don't do to support safety.

• There are the little but tremendously impactful things like handwashing.
• There are the often-challenging ones like completely reconciling patient medications.
• Many of these are easy to forget or rush past unless they become automatic, like the surgical time-out.
• Each of these has been shown to prevent harm and save lives.

Keeping patient safety top of mind in everything we do is a central tenet for us at EvergreenHealth. It is why we report in our daily huddle on events large and small, and importantly also, for near misses. When indicated, we participate in a root cause analysis (RCA) where, as a team, we review what we can do better for the next patient, for each other, and for our community. Patient safety also underlies our commitment to being a High Reliability Organization (HRO). One of the five principles of an HRO is a preoccupation with failure – a proactive look at what we do, how things can go wrong and how we can prevent that from happening.

So, while Rule #3 may sound pretty simple, the significance of each of our roles in preventing iatrogenic harm cannot be overstated. Everyone on our staff takes part in keeping our present and future patients safe. Awareness is a big piece of that and why we call that out this week. However, in everything we do every day and every week, there's a bit of Hippocrates and a lot of primum non nocere.