Lucian Leape, MD, former chief of pediatric surgery at Burlington, Mass.-based Tufts Medicine and a pioneer in the field of patient safety, has died. He was 94.
Dr. Leape co-authored a 1999 “landmark” report that linked deaths from medical errors to “dysfunctional systems — not flawed individuals,” according to a July 1 report from The New York Times. The concept of systemic error, though common in other industries, was relatively unknown in healthcare at the time. The report was credited with spurring changes from length of resident physician work shifts to required error reporting and patient safety departments.
“There might have developed a patient safety movement in health care without Lucian, but he made it happen years before it otherwise would have,” Donald Berwick, MD, former CMS administrator and president emeritus at the Boston-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, told the Times. “He was probably the first pedigreed specialist from the mainstream of health care to give this problem a name.”
Read the full report here.
