Role of clinician involvement in patient safety in obstetrics and gynecology.

Patient safety is a significant concern for healthcare providers. Involving physicians in clinical quality activities in obstetrics and gynecology can be difficult for many reasons including time demands, lack of knowledge of process improvement activities, or change fatigue due to failure of adequate implementation of previous activities. This overview for improving the culture of safety identifies roles physicians can play from participating in quality assessment and improvement activities, improving teamwork between disciplines, communicating effectively, creating departmental guidelines, and deciding on outcome measures for benchmarking. An improved culture of safety is better for our patients and may reduce malpractice exposure.