The Price of Perfection: The Cost of Error

Abstract

In this book proposal, Charles L. Bosk synthesizes 50 years of ethnographic research to consider a key question: Why have decades of patient safety initiatives to reduce preventable deaths and adverse safety events failed to make traction on either one? With his incomparable wit and dry humor, Bosk takes us through the changes to the medical system that accompany his own evolution from a doctoral student to accomplished professional. Bosk's last work prods us to think deeply about the nature of medical error, our attempts to fix it, and what it means to improve medical care.