John M. Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Awards.

Punitive Damages: How Judges and Juries Perform

A substantial recent literature has documented the inability of jurors to make sound decisions with respect to punitive damages, particularly for health, safety, and environmental torts. Included in this literature are experimental studies documenting the better performance of judges than jurors for the same case scenarios. Recent research by Eisenberg et al. (2002) has suggested, however, that...

The end of the beginning: the strategic approach to patient safety research.

The "To Err is Human" report and the patient safety literature.

BACKGROUND The "To Err is Human" report published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 1999 called for a national effort to make health care safer. Although the report has been widely credited with spawning efforts to study and improve safety in health care, there has been limited objective assessment of its impact. We evaluated the effects of the IOM report on patient safety publications and ...

When is "good enough"? The role and responsibility of physicians to improve patient safety.

In September 2001, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the ABIM Foundation jointly sponsored an invitational conference entitled "The Role and Responsibility of Physicians to Improve Patient Safety." The goal of the conference was to begin a national conversation focusing on the individual clinician's role and strategies physicians might employ to advance patient safety. T...

Safety I to Safety II: A Paradigm Shift or More Work as Imagined?; Comment on “False Dawns and New Horizons in Patient Safety Research and Practice”

In their editorial, Mannion and Braithwaite contend that the approach to solving the problem of unsafe care, Safety I, is flawed and requires a shift in thinking to what they are calling Safety II. We have reservations as to whether by itself the shift from Safety I to Safety II is sufficient. Perhaps our failure to improve outcomes in the field of patient safety and quality lies less in our ap...