The pre-eminence of patient safety in health care governance

In the field of health care, the first decades of the 21st century will be remembered as the time period when patient safety became a central pillar of healthcare governance. This era was ushered in by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report “To err is human: building a safer health system” (Kohn, Corrigan & Donaldson 1999) which focused on the human cost of medical errorPatient safety continues to occupy the minds of both patients and of health care providers. This article reviews a number of authors publishing in the current issue of IJHG who pose questions about patient safety and consider solutions to ensure patients remain safe and health practitioners can do their jobs with the assurance that they will be able to fulfill the edict of the Hippocratic oath, to do no harm