Did you know that a checked bag on an airline flight is still exponentially safer than a patient in an American Hospital? It is not very comforting to consider that a toothbrush has a better chance of reaching its destination than a patient has of leaving a hospital unscathed. This begs the question…why? John J. Nance, JD frames the issue this way: “Nine long years after the Institute of Medicine told us nearly 100,000 patients die each year from avoidable errors in our hospitals (To Err Is Human, 1999), the struggle to significantly reduce major patient injuries has barely begun. The primary reason it’s so tough to change the system is that no less than the culture of medical practice has been challenged and is, in effect, resisting change. This is cultural inertia, the ‘This is the way we’ve always done it’ syndrome, yet the root cause of poor patient safety performance lies squarely in the mythology that human perfection in medicine is achievable—the presumption that humans can practice without mistakes.”

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Hospitals will truly fly when the “This is the way we have always done it,” is finally recognized as the way it should never be done again. John Nance’s mission, “is to convince you that patient safety and service quality can be dramatically improved only when the traditional, hidebound methods of handling a human institution are abandoned and the hospital is run to directly support, and be extremely responsive to, the needs and limitations of the people who actually take care of the patient. This is not theory, but fact, based on the hard-fought experience of other industries—most notably aviation. And it means the creation of a new type of patient-centered culture dependent on the professionals who are the hospital—in other words a flip-flop of the old model in which people work for a hospital in favor of a paradigm in which the hospital’s primary purpose is building and maintaining a structure that dynamically supports the teams that provide the care.”

Hospitals will only fly when doctors, nurses, CEOs, trustees and every healthcare stakeholder overcomes the inertia that is anchoring hospitals to the failed cultural foundations of the past and embraces a new paradigm of patient-centered care. Because, as Nance explains, “The reality is that hospitals are people, and when, as a team, they can climb free of the failed methods of the past, they indeed can fly, in both spirit and accomplishment. The time to take this flight is now and this is your boarding call.