26:2H-12.24. Findings, declarations relative to patient safety

2. The Legislature finds and declares that:

a. Adverse events, some of which are the result of preventable errors, are inherent in all systems, and the health care literature demonstrates that the great majority of medical errors result from systems problems, not individual incompetence;

b. Well-designed systems have processes built in to minimize the occurrence of errors, as well as to detect those that do occur; they incorporate mechanisms to continually improve their performance;

c. To enhance patient safety, the goal is to craft a health care delivery system that minimizes, to the greatest extent feasible, the harm to patients that results from the delivery system itself;

d. An important component of a successful patient safety strategy is a feedback mechanism that allows detection and analysis not only of adverse events, but also of "near-misses";

e. To encourage disclosure of these events so that they can be analyzed and used for improvement, it is critical to create a non-punitive culture that focuses on improving processes rather than assigning blame. Health care facilities and professionals must be held accountable for serious preventable adverse events; however, punitive environments are not particularly effective in promoting accountability and increasing patient safety, and may be a deterrent to the exchange of information required to reduce the opportunity for errors to occur in the complex systems of care delivery. Fear of sanctions induces health care professionals and organizations to be silent about adverse events, resulting in serious under-reporting; and

f. By establishing an environment that both mandates the confidential disclosure of the most serious, preventable adverse events, and also encourages the voluntary, anonymous and confidential disclosure of less serious adverse events, as well as preventable events and near misses, the State seeks to increase the amount of information on systems failures, analyze the sources of these failures and disseminate information on effective practices for reducing systems failures and improving the safety of patients.

L.2004,c.9,s.2.