Just six months after Diane Pinakiewicz resigned her post as president of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Boston-based not-for-profit has named Dr. Tejal Gandhi as her successor.
Gandhi, who is currently the chief quality and safety officer of 12-hospital Partners HealthCare System, also in Boston, will assume her new role as president July 1, the NPSF announced Thursday, during its annual Patient Safety Congress in New Orleans.
A board-certified internist, Gandhi also is an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Before joining Partners, she spent a decade as executive director of quality and safety at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston.
In a news release, Dr. Gerald Hickson, chair of NPSF's board of directors, said the group was “thrilled” with Gandhi's appointment and he praised her multidisciplinary background in research, patient care and leadership.
Dr. Robert Wachter, chief of the division of hospital medicine at UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco, and a well-known expert in the patient-safety field, lauded NPSF's choice.
“She's a world-class researcher who also has experience in the trenches, and I think it was very important for NPSF to find someone who knew both worlds, operations and research,” he said in an interview, adding that Gandhi's appointment makes it much more likely that NPSF can position itself as the central organization in an increasingly crowded field.
Gandhi is a long-time member of NPSF's board of governors, serving most recently as its vice chair. As head of NPSF, she'll also be president of the Lucian Leape Institute, an 11-member think tank housed within NPSF.
Follow Maureen McKinney on Twitter: @MHMMcKinney
Send us a letter
Have an opinion about this story? Click here to submit a Letter to the Editor, and we may publish it in print.
