Patient Safety Climate Among Orthopaedic Surgery Residents

Patient safety has attained a higher profile since the Institute of Medicine's report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, was distributed in 2000¹. This report suggested that many hospital errors were related to flaws within the health-care delivery system. Many organizations—aviation, nuclear power, the military, and some industries—have realized that safe systems are essential for creating a barrier between human errors and adverse events². Organizations with systems designed to minimize errors, prevent adverse events, and produce reliable outcomes despite intrinsic risks have been termed highly reliable organizations^2,3. Health-care institutions are now being challenged by both internal and external forces to become highly reliable organizations by applying systems-based approaches to address patient safety.