Patient Safety and Quality Improvement: Developing a Systems View (Patient Safety I)

I feel that I learned a lot about care safety and quality simply by taking this relatively short course. The material establishes the history and baseline lexicon & concepts through which patient safety and quality improvement can be furthered. Being exposed to the hospital setting, I am painfully aware of the problems in healthcare raised in this offering. Fortunately, the course "raised" my standards for what should be considered acceptable in health service delivery, and I have started questioning a lot of the elements in the hospital care that I previously assumed to be "normal" and "unchangeable." Perhaps the most important takeaway I got from this course is that all safety and quality problems in the hospital (or in any institution that takes care of patients) are all systems problems, rather than those due to a mere single discrete participant or component of those systems.