Susan Sheridan: Very surprised. I was honored of course, and I was delighted to see that Modern Healthcare was acknowledging and recognizing the value that a patient advocate can contribute to healthcare and specific, in patient safety.
Susan Sheridan: Leadership in healthcare will require tremendous passion and a profound amount of courage and dedication, but that the rewards and the change is absolutely possible. So I think my two components to anybody who wants to be leadership would be passion and courage.
Susan Sheridan: I believe the most important issue facing healthcare today is that: patient safety and quality. I say that from personal experience in that I've witnessed from the failures in our healthcare system, and my son suffered brain damage from a series of system failures, and my husband passed away from a lost pathology. And so I witnessed two incredibly preventable events in healthcare, and so I think something that's facing us is to look at the healthcare system are redesign it in a way that is safer, that delivers better quality and that in creating that system, we need to bring patients, patient advocates, family members who've experienced healthcare in one way or another, to the table to help redesign that healthcare system together.
Susan Sheridan: I think there is a lot of discussion right now about healthcare—in the reform debate as well as in just healthcare in general—where safety has become somewhat diluted because of other issues taking a greater importance. And so my desire is to keep patient safety in the forefront as we look at other—access and the financing of patient safety. If we really look at patient safety as one of the most important issues in healthcare, and we can look at how patient safety can really help in the reduction of costs, and how if we're going to increase access to all patients, we want to increase access to a safe and quality system.
Susan Sheridan: There's a variety of issues that my organization, called Consumers Advancing Patient Safety, we're really bringing the consumer voice—the collective patient voice—to the table. And so there's a variety of issues that are very important to us. And one of them being that we want to see patients on boards. We want to see patients on advisory councils. We want to see an active, educated patient voice on all aspects of our healthcare system and in the reform and in the design of our healthcare system. Some other areas we want to see patients actively involved in: investigation. When there are failures in our healthcare system, we want patients helping investigate that. We want patients involved in creating a more equitable, more just tort system. We want to see patients involved in the design of patient-safety solutions working in partnership with, for example, the Joint Commission and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and public health officials where we help design and implement patient-safety solutions.
