It is probably the first patient safety institute of its kind in the country.  John Hopkins has announced that it will use a $10 million gift to set up a patient safety institute.  The goal of the institute would be to study the prevention of hospital- acquired infections, improper treatment, misdiagnosis and other kinds of medical errors that contribute to thousands of deaths every year.  Arizona patient safety lawyers believe that it's high time we had a center like this. 

The institute will be known as the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality.  The institute will conduct research into infection prevention and control, misdiagnosis, mistreatment and other common patient safety problems in the United States.  The $10 million gift has been given by C. Michael Armstrong, who is the chairman of John Hopkins Medicine's Board of Trustees as well as a former chairman of Comcast, AT&T and IBM World Trade Corporation. 

According to Armstrong, in spite of the fact that there is an intense focus on patient care at John Hopkins, every year he would come across several cases of patients injured due to medical errors.  He felt the need to establish a center that would focus exclusively on the prevention of such errors, thereby enhancing patient safety.

A recent study published in the journal Health Affairs found that as many as 1/3^rd of patients suffer a medical error.  The rates of such errors have remained more or less constant over the years, in spite of increasing concerns over the injuries and deaths from such errors every year.  Hospitals have been under pressure to share data about infections and mistakes in their facilities, and to raise the focus on quality reporting and analysis. 

John Hopkins has a special place in patient safety - one of the doctors, Peter Pronovost, a professor of anesthesiology at the center, developed a checklist aimed at the prevention of medical errors.  The checklist is currently being used by thousands of hospitals and facilities across the country.  In some states, there has been a substantial reduction of hospital errors by as much as 10% from the use of the checklist.