John Foster Professorship Marked in NY with Insights on Medical Error
The establishment of the John H. Foster Professorship of Health Policy
and Management and its incumbent, Arnold Epstein, was marked on March
31 at the Harvard Club in New York with a presentation on the "medical
errors movement" by Lucian Leape, adjunct professor of health policy.
It's not people but the system that is responsible for medical error,
explained Leape who just returned from a conference in Europe where, he
reported, the concept of correcting systems error in medicine is taking
hold. Leape had testified in London at the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry,
hearings aimed at understanding what led to the high percentage of deaths
among children who underwent complex cardiac surgery at a regional hospital
over more than a decade.
