Harvard Executive Sessions

The Harvard Executive Sessions on Medical Error and Patient Safety... 

The Harvard Executive Session, first described in the Introduction, had a profound personal effect on its participants. This section provides insight into the methodology used to create the environment for such personal transformation to occur. The executive session is a method for creating change in leadership. The executive session model has been replicated in a variety of ways to challenge conventional wisdom and quicken the pace of cultural change in health care and other fields. 

Fortunately, an occasional leader has recognized the gravity of the situation and the need to take responsibility for changing this type of culture. The authors of this book not only found support from such individuals but also knew what to do with it. They had two very different experiences, as chronicled in the Introduction, but both authors made impressive changes in the cultures of their institutions. Each has been on the front line, and each has experience in implementing the techniques recommended in this volume. The lessons they learned from their experiences form the core around which this remarkable book is constructed. This book is not the outcome of a theoretical exercise. Its skeleton comes from the Harvard Executive Session on Medical Error and Patient Safety manifesto for leaders, but the knowledge and advice it offers come from practical, frontline experience. 

The chapters in this book are structured around the patient safety manifesto developed at the Harvard Executive Session on Medical Error and Patient Safety. The Executive Session brought together senior leaders in health care from aroimd the nation to examine the failures in current health care models and to develop models of health care delivery that do no harm (see the Introduction and Chapter Nine for further information on the Harvard Executive Session). Leaders emerged with a seven-point manifesto for creating a system of harm-free care. With the exception of Chapters Two and Three, which provide basic information about the science of patient safety, and Chapter Ten, which recaps the lessons offered by the book as a whole, the titles of the chapters are the same as the seven commitments of the manifesto ... 

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