Constancy of Purpose for Improving Patient Safety — Missing in Action

Abstract

The 20th-century statistician and quality scholar W. Edwards Deming proposed the “14 Points for Top Leaders” — a checklist of management principles for executives who wish to nurture improvement in complex systems. First on his list was “constancy of purpose for improvement.”1 In Deming’s view, when leaders slacken their visible commitment to a goal, progress slows or stalls. For a period of time after the publication of the 2000 report by the Institute of Medicine (now known as the National Academy of Medicine) titled, “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System,”2 improving patient safety was a priority in . . .

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