Joan Boomsma

Text version of Joan Boomsma's keynote remarks

Good morning. I’m Joan Boomsma, Vice President of Medical Affairs at St. Francis Hospital and Health Center in Blue Island, Illinois.
For me, “it’s in our hands” means keeping our patients safe. I’m a pulmonary and critical care physician.  When I was in clinical practice, I would care for one patient at a time. In a very literal sense, each patient in the ICU was in my hands.  It was up to me to make sure that the care I provided was as good as it could possibly be and the rest of the ICU team felt the same way.  We did everything we could to make sure that our patients got the best possible care and were safe from errors and needless complications. 

As Director of the Intensive Care Unit I would often get frustrated when I saw patients who ended up in the ICU because of a medical error.  I felt like we’d failed those patients and wanted to figure out what to do to make sure it never happened to another patient.  That’s how I got interested in hospital management – to be able to have an impact on improving the systems and processes that the care of our patients is dependent on.

In my job now, at St. Francis in Blue Island, even though I no longer provide one-on-one patient care, I feel like I can impact the care of all of our patients.  The safety of every patient at St. Francis is, in a sense, in my hands.  Of course I’m not alone.  Everyone of us has a role to play in keeping our patients safe.  It’s in all of our hands.

Over the last few years, there have been a number of articles with titles like: “The Business Case for Quality” or “The Business Case for Patient Safety.”  And yes, I believe it really does make good business sense to provide the highest quality care.  The best performers provide the highest quality and the lowest costs after all.  But, in the end, we don’t really need a business case to strive to provide the best possible care and make sure every patient in our hospitals is safe, do we??  I don’t think the early sisters needed a business case to decide to help the victims of yellow fever and influenza.  They knew it was in their hands.  The safety of our patients is in our hands.