Page 79 - The Power to Change Anything

68 INFLUENCER

Improvement (IHI). In a recent interview, Berwick shared an
alarming statistic: The National Academy of Science reported
that 44,000 to 98,000 people are killed by their health care
every year, placing medical injury as the eighth largest public
health hazard in America.
In December 2004, Dr. Berwick stood in front of a group
of thousands of health-care professionals and issued an auda-
cious challenge: “I think we should save 100,000 lives. I think
we should do that by June 14, 2006.” Pause. “By 9 a.m.” The
success of the 100,000 lives campaign is now in the record
books. At the time of the writing of this book, IHI upped the
ante with a 5 million lives worldwide campaign.
One of Berwick’s greatest challenges is to help caring pro-
fessionals recognize that their own health-care systems might
be causing harm—prolonging hospital stays and even killing
patients.
As you might imagine, telling physicians that they may
be inadvertently putting patients in harm’s way isn’t an easy
message to share. These are folks whose purpose in life (to
which they take a sacred oath) is to provide assistance, to
cure, and if nothing else, to do no harm. These are highly
skilled professionals who often fail to recognize how their indi-
vidual actions play out in a large, complex human system. So
how can Berwick engage energy and curiosity without provok-
ing defensiveness?
He tells stories. For example, the story of Josie King is one
for which Berwick and his colleagues have a deep reverence.

MEET JOSIE KING

Josie King was a little girl who loved to dance. She was 18
months old, had brown eyes and light brown hair, and she had
just learned to say, “I love you.” In January of 2001 Josie
stepped into a hot bath and burned herself badly. Her parents
rushed her to Johns Hopkins Hospital where she was admitted