A new gift from Lucian Leape, longtime faculty member in the Department of Health Policy and Management, will establish the Patient Safety and Quality of Care Fund. The fund will support both research and education in the areas of patient safety and quality improvement, with no restrictions on the activities to which it can be applied.
Leape is recognized as a leader in the movement to make medical care safer since a seminal 1994 publication entitled “Error in Medicine.” His gift was motivated by a desire to bring fresh thinking into this rapidly developing field. “Patient safety has a huge agenda to address and it’s critical that we bring in new blood to advance the field,” Leape says.
Leape’s gift is a vote of confidence in what he called “the best department of its kind in the country.” He and his wife are firm believers in the importance of unrestricted gifts to universities, and have been making such gifts to HSPH for nearly 20 years.
The opportunity to have a measurable impact on the future of a field to which he is so committed inspired him to make a contribution that would make patient safety a more attractive field for students and junior faculty just getting started out in the field. The Chair of the Department will have substantial flexibility to direct the use of the fund, because, Leape says, he wants his contribution “to be an asset, not a barrier.”