What makes Telluride, CO awesome? The faculty and campers of the 2015 Patient Safety Summer Camp creating excitement about patient safety! By planting the seeds of open communication between caregivers and patients, and utilizing tools and strategies to reduce patient harm this amazing group of individuals has the opportunity to be the change agents that reform our current healthcare system. Maintaining open communication lines between healthcare professionals and the patients they care for leads to opportunities to learn from our human errors and create systems to prevent those same errors from occurring in the future, which ultimately results in better patient outcomes. However, there are barriers to creating transparency. Barriers such as fear, punishments, incompetent feelings, litigation, lack of training and skills, lack of protocol for transparency, ego, and hierarchy stand in our way of a transparent culture. On the other hand, the benefits of open and honest communication with patients and their families have the ability to produce even greater benefits than we could ever imagine. The magic of transparency improves trust, builds integrity, and promotes learning and psychological wellbeing. Additionally, transparency actually decreases the chance of litigation. There are many positive effects of transparency and we as healthcare providers must gain the courage to promote leadership by advocating for transparency. The outstanding faculty of the 2015 Patient Safety Summer Camp has given us a tool bag filled with the tools needed to be change agents and now it is our responsibility to reflect on the valuable information and begin to implement it across the nation. Imagine what changes across the nation can be made if we remember to bring our tool bag to work with us when we return to our workplaces. My hope is that our excitement around patient safety spreads like wild fire to the point that nothing can extinguish it and we never hear of heart wrenching stories such as Lewis Blackmon and Michael Skolnik again. We have work to do but as Dave Mayer said, zero can be reached!
