Learning Objectives

• Understand the connection between psychological safety and both clinician wellbeing and patient safety
• Delineate the barriers that leaders face in holding powerful people accountable for their behaviors that undermine psychological safety
• Establish an organizational program to support psychological safety through education and a fair accountability process

Speakers

JO SHAPIRO, MD, FACS, is an associate professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. She is Principle Faculty for the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston and a Consultant for the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Anesthesia, Pain and Critical Care.

In 2008, she founded the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Professionalism and Peer Support where she served as the director for over 10 years. During that me the Center became a model for national and international institutions seeking methods to enhance a culture of trust and respect and improve clinician wellbeing. She continues to educate and assist organizations in developing specific programmatic and educational approaches such as peer support, wellbeing programs, professionalism initiatives, and conflict management.

She served as chair of the Ethics and Professionalism Committee of the American Board of Medical Specialties and has held multiple educational leadership roles including: senior associate director of Graduate Medical Education for Mass General Brigham, founding scholar of the Academy at Harvard Medical School, and president of the Society of University Otolaryngologists. She was one of BWH’s first woman division chiefs. She serves on the faculty of the Harvard Leadership Development for Physicians and Scientists where she teaches giving difficult feedback. She was a faculty member of the Department of Surgery at BWH for over 35 years; her surgical expertise was in treating adults with oropharyngeal dysphagia. She was named as a finalist for the Schwartz Center Compassionate Caregiver Award. In 2019, Harvard Medical School gave her the Shirley Driscoll Dean’s Award for the Enhancement of Women’s Careers.

ALLAN FRANKEL, MD, Chief Executive Officer, Safe & Reliable Healthcare, is an internationally recognized high reliability expert with a deep focus on leadership and culture change. Over the last three decades, Dr. Frankel has assessed more than 1000 organizations and trained and certified more than 3000 healthcare leaders and managers in safety and reliability. As Senior Faculty for the IHI and the Intermountain Advanced Training Program [ATP], Dr. Frankel has designed and led well-published efforts to transform national health systems, large health plans with millions of members, and integrated care delivery systems in North America, the NHS UK and Scotland, Hong Kong, and the Gulf Region. Dr. Frankel’s career in high reliability has been highlighted by serial innovations and contributions to the field. Some of these include co-development of surveys including the SAQ survey (1994), the AHRQ/SOPS family of surveys (2002), and the SCORE High Reliability Assessment Tool (2014); Executive Healthcare WalkRounds (2001); the Global Trigger Tool to measure all cause harm (2003); and LENS High Reliability Huddle boards (2016). Dr. Frankel continues to serve as a senior advisor for reliability and safety for the Military Health System; Kaiser Permanente; Mayo Clinic; the Veterans Health Administration and several other leading systems.

Dr. Frankel serves as a longtime co-editor of the Joint Commission’s Essential Guide for Patient Safety Officers along with his business partner, Dr. Michael Leonard. Key tenets of the central framework for high reliability that Safe & Reliable Healthcare co-developed and co-published with the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, including those related to assessment and change management, have been adopted by various organizations including the Joint Commission’s ORO 2.0 program. Dr. Frankel continues to develop and share field-defining insights on high reliability and is the author of three books and numerous peer-reviewed publications.

In the mid-90s, Dr. Frankel served as the first physician Patient Safety Officer in the United States for the Harvard hospitals / Partners Healthcare.