The Impact of Patient Safety Culture on the Medical System

Since the release of ”To Err Is Human”, the Institute of Medicine has created patient safety as the slogan of the reform of the health care medical system. As the Institute of Medicine has successfully used several horrible medical adverse events to make the public be aware of the importance of patient safety, for the issue is so close to most people and so devastating while the medical adverse events were occurring, thus the Institute of Medicine arouses the people to identify the significance of the patient safety, and in this way, we could say the Institute of Medicine is quite successful and impressive in manipulating this topic. The Institute of Medicine was charged to unveil the reform of the health care medical system by the federal government for the promotion of the quality for the next ten years. From then on, not only the United States, but also the European countries, and the Australia all started to implement measures or policies to improve patient safety culture for better health care quality. Patient safety is a part of the reform of health care medical system for the promotion of the quality, yet from the other perspective of sociology and medical history, this kind of the reform of patient safety is also a form of ”social control” from outer side, this sort of social control is for the standardization and titration of the delivery of health care. In the United States, the accreditation system like the Joint Commission Accreditation of Healthcare Organization (JCAHO, now named as Joint Commission) can accredit the healthcare organization such as the hospitals, nursing home, and other medical systems to influence the reimbursement of the medical organizations, and it means the absolute compliance of the medical organization for the accrediting rules, and this implementation of the accreditation could be used as a way to cut the growing budget of the medical expenses, and the regulation rules also build the bureaucratic system more unbreakable. In the meantime, we could see the loss caused by the imperfect quality of healthcare delivery, such as the individual level and macroscopic level loss, even the loss of gross national productivity was mentioned. Thus, the medical systems are not saviors any more; they're the blamed targets by the public. We are going to introduce the broad spectrum of patient safety in a concise category for the medical system and wish the practitioners to understand this so-called ”century tsunami” could drown anyone not well prepared and we will discuss this impact imposed by patient safety culture from the perspective of sociology and medical history.