A Harvard research team recently set out to better understand what managers can do to encourage employees to speak up about problems, and to investigate how managers can encourage employees to offer solutions
Ten years ago, the Institute of Medicine published To Err is Human, a groundbreaking report that pushed the issue of medical errors into the public spotlight.
That we all make mistakes was certainly nothing new: Operational failures occur across all industries. But the impact of errors in the context of the health-care industry drew instant attention. Preventable medical errors resulting in injury cost the industry somewhere between $9 billion and $15 billion a year, the report stated. Even more shockingly, by some measures the number of patient deaths attributed to operational failures annually in the United States equaled the crash of one fully loaded 747 airplane every one-and-a-half days.
This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.