Patient safety is not a new concept for health care practitioners, but the attention focused on it by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System galvanized public and media attention as well as policymakers (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000). While safety issues are not new for most caregivers, knowledge of how mistakes and errors occur has been advanced by studying other high-risk industries, such as aviation, space, and nuclear power, and learning from a special discipline called human factors engineering (Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 2000). This chapter provides an overview of how national attention recently became focused on a topic that springs from ancient Greek times in which the phrase associated with caring for the ill is "First, do no harm." Recent attention on safety is inextricably linked with quality
of care initiatives, so the chapters in this book will also address patient safety concepts within a larger quality framework.