A Joint Statement of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Society of Ophthalmic Registered Nurses and the American Association of Eye and Ear Hospitals. The report brought increased national focus to issues regarding patient safety, stimulating public and private initiatives to tackle underlying systematic errors in health care delivery. This report also recommended the establishment of a national focus for leadership and knowledge. In 1999, the National Patient Safety Foundation approved an Agenda for Research and Development in Patient Safety. Improving safety depends on learning how safety emerges from interactions of the components.
Patient safety is a subset of health care quality.
The AAO supports the IOM's goal to reduce medical errors and to improve safety of health care. The AAO also supports the National Patient Safety Foundation's mission to improve health care safety by studying how errors occur and implementing safeguards. To cultivate a climate of learning about incidents and how to implement systems that will advance patient safety, the Academy is launching this small series of Patient Safety Bulletins to increase the visibility of patient safety and to inform ophthalmologists of systematic practices that can prevent errors from occurring. The Academy is committed to improving patient care through its ongoing quality of care activities. These include the evidence-based development and dissemination of clinical practice guidelines, ophthalmic technology assessments, and complementary therapy assessments, collection of outcomes and performance measures, and development of a standard clinical reference terminology and digital imaging standards to improve access to timely and comprehensive information for medical decisionmaking.