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Inspiring a culture of patient safety
- Dr Peter LachmanLead Faculty for Quality Improvement at the RCPI (Royal College of Physicians of Ireland)
Key points
- We already know what to do to be safe; the problem is implementation.
- Patient safety should be embedded in medical students' training from the start, not learnt afterwards.
- Staff should ask every day whether children and staff are being kept safe, making safety a proactive habit.
Dr Peter Lachman, Lead Faculty for Quality Improvement at the RCPI (Royal College of Physicians of Ireland), shares his expert perspective on embedding a culture of safety within medical education and clinical practice. Drawing on decades of experience in patient safety, he emphasises the importance of making patient safety a core element of medical training, rather than a reactive concept introduced after graduation. Dr Lachman advocates for proactive, habitual safety practices in hospitals, and calls for a significant transformation in the design of medical education and healthcare systems to ensure safety is prioritised every day. This approach has the potential to improve outcomes for both patients and staff and to raise standards of care on a global scale. This interview took place at the RCPCH conference 2025 in Glasgow, Scotland.
This interview is featured by the Paediatric Video Journal and is protected by copyright laws and treaties around the world. All rights are reserved.
Read the transcript
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. It may contain errors, so check it against the video before quoting.
So I've been working in the field of patient safety for the last 25, 30 years and we actually know what to do to be safe, but the problem is implementation. So my latest thoughts on this is that we need to put patient safety in the genome of the medical students. So when they are being at medical school and they're studying, they have to have it injected in their genome.
Now if you think what a genome is, your DNA, and once it's in your DNA it becomes what you do and therefore you always will be safe. Currently they learn about it afterwards, it's just too late. So we need to change medical education, we need to change the way we work and the way we do things in hospital in order to be safe.
So if you translate this into what people need to do day to day, they have to make patient safety their business, not something they react to, but something they do proactively. And every day they have to say, "Are we being safe? Are we keeping children safe? Are we keeping staff safe?" And do that every day as part of what they do. Just like they brush their teeth, if they do that every day, they will be safe. Become a habit rather than something reacting to when an event occurs.
Currently they react. So we have to really think differently in how we educate and how we do, and that will take a major revolution because we have designed healthcare in a different way and we have to design it in a new way to be safer than we are now.
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Cite this video
Dr Peter Lachman. “Inspiring a culture of patient safety.” The Paediatric Video Journal, 23 June 2025. https://paediatricvj.com/videos/inspiring-a-culture-of-patient-safety-lachman/
This interview is educational content intended for healthcare professionals and is not medical advice. Views expressed are those of the speaker. © The Paediatric Video Journal. All rights reserved.