Healthcare execs confront safety as a purpose

Surveying the US healthcare landscape, some leaders are wondering, what if safety was valued as a purpose, rather than a priority? 

Patricia Gaffigan, senior advisor on patient and workforce safety for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), voiced this question at an IHI conference in December. She said priorities are at risk of being reduced to a set of improvement projects — like fleeting goals, or something beholden to a start and end date. 

When asked to describe the difference between safety as a priority and safety as a purpose, leaders from UCSF Health, M Health Fairview, Inova Health System and Jefferson Health told Becker's that while priorities are important, they can deprioritise other plans, or even be deprioritised themselves. 

"We, like all health systems, have a mission," said Chapy Venkatesan, chief quality and safety officer of Fairfax, Va.-based Inova. "The center component of our mission is world-class healthcare. So that is really our purpose. Safety is part of that purpose."

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Source: Becker's Clinical Leadership, 18 February 2025