From “Turning Never Events into a Smile,” by Tom James, MD
“The phrase ‘never events’ evokes strong feelings in both medical and consumer circles. Picker Institute has seized the concept and stood it on its head to come up with the notion of ‘always events.’ Picker is looking to identify those elements of the healthcare experience that should always happen from a humanistic perspective. As physicist/inventor Harvey Picker stated in 2006: ‘I think we’re all convinced that it is possible to treat patients as human beings, meeting their wants and worries, as defined by them, and not the doctor.’”
Dr. James is a member of the National Steering Committee of the Picker Institute/Always Events initiative. This article is reprinted with permission from Louisville Medicine, where it first appeared in June 2010. Click here to read the whole article.