Patient safety legislation: A crucial victory

Passage of the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 marks a giant step toward sweeping reforms.

Editorial. Aug. 22/29, 2005.

It's long been said that our health care system needs to undergo a transformation in terms of patient safety. The shift must be from a culture of blame into one of openness and prevention, one in which future medical errors are avoided by learning from past mistakes, and one in which the most important questions have to do with why an adverse event occurred.

Yet that goal has been elusive, despite years of hard and productive work on patient safety. A crucial missing ingredient was federal legislation that put the force -- and protection -- of national law behind these bold ideas.

But that ingredient is missing no more.

With last month's overwhelming bipartisan congressional approval of the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, followed two days later by the president's signature, this bill became law. Now patients and physicians alike can be confident that this crucial step has finally been achieved.

Improving patient safety and quality has been a top priority for the American Medical Association. Enactment of this bill represents the culmination of years of hard work by the House of Medicine and its patient safety partners.

What makes the victory so sweet is that the measure strikes a crucial balance between maintaining confidentiality for reporting error information and ensuring accountability and patients' legal rights. The AMA was part of the core group of health care organizations that developed the principles on which these provisions are based, including the ability to share information for evidence-based research without waiving confidentiality.