Perspectives

Sorrel King is the mother of Josie King, who died tragically in 2001 at age 18 months because of medical errors during a hospitalization at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She has subsequently become one of the nation’s foremost patient advocates for safety, forming an influential foundation (the Josie King Foundation) and partnering with Johns Hopkins to promote the field of patient safety around the world.

Lucian Leape, MD, is generally known as the father of the modern patient safety movement in the United States. A Harvard professor, Leape shifted his career two decades ago from his clinical practice as a pediatric surgeon to a focus on understanding how medical errors occur and how patient safety can be improved. The result was several groundbreaking studies and commentaries that helped shift the paradigm from "bad people" to "bad systems," and which paved the way for the Institute of Medicine report, "To Err is Human," which he helped write. He has received dozens of honors, including the John M. Eisenberg patient safety award, the duPont Award for Excellence in Children's Health Care, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator's Award in Health Policy Research. He spoke to us about his remarkable career and his thoughts about the patient safety movement.