U.S. House Bill to Establish an NPSB

On March 8, 2024, U.S. Reps. Nanette Barragán (CA-44) and Dr. Michael Burgess (TX-26), members of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, reintroduced the National Patient Safety Board Act (H.R. 7591), legislation that would establish a National Patient Safety Board (NPSB), a nonpunitive, collaborative, and independent board within the Department of Health and Human Services to address safety in health care modeled in part after successful entities in the transportation industry. This landmark legislation is a critical step to improve safety for patients and healthcare providers by coordinating existing efforts within a single independent agency solely focused on addressing patient safety in health care.

  • The NPSB’s data-driven solutions would prevent harm before it occurs and reduce the burden on frontline teams.
  • The NPSB would aggregate and analyze existing patient safety data collected across HHS agencies to gain national insights.
  • No government entity is tasked with looking at patient safety nationwide; NPSB would fill this gap.
  • A coalition of over 90 leading healthcare organizations and stakeholders is on board.
  • Now is the time for Congress to establish the NPSB.

Email Your Representative

Reach out to your U.S. House member’s office to ask for their support on the National Patient Safety Board Act, which creates a National Patient Safety Board to focus on bringing stakeholders together and collectively implementing solutions to prevent medical harms.

Download a sample legislator letter to use as a template for crafting your personal message to your representative. Customized messages can have an even greater impact.

  • If you have a relationship with your representative, please reference it.
  • If you have a story about a patient safety issue experienced by you or someone you know, please consider including it.

Identify Your Representative

The email and physical addresses of your elected officials are available on their websites. You can find out who represents you and their contact information at https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Other Ways You Can Help

Below are materials you can use to help spread the message about the NPSB and gain support for this critical legislation.

“Patient safety problems cause significant preventable suffering in our country. We can and must do better. Solutions exist, but we need leadership and smart policy to bring them together wisely. That’s why I’m so grateful to Representative Barragan and Representative Burgess as well as the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative for championing the NPSB. All of us at Leapfrog who grade hospitals on patient safety, including our cadre of employers and patient advocates demanding patient safety for over 20 years, look forward to working together with you to make sure patients always come first.”
– Leah Binder, MA, MGA, president and chief executive officer, The Leapfrog Group

“Patient safety is our number one priority for every decision we make as a health system. As a High-Reliability Organization, we strive for a culture of safety that results in the best possible patient outcomes, every time. This legislation is welcome news both for patients everywhere and healthcare leaders like us who are committed to continually improving the quality of clinical care.”
– Stephen R.T. Evans, MD, executive vice president and chief medical officer, MedStar Health

“As a mother who lost a child to medical errors, I wanted to make sure there was learning from the event so it wouldn’t happen again to anyone else. However, those events stay in each individual setting and are not disseminated to a larger audience. We need a central agency like the National Patient Safety Board to gather data on these events, analyze them, share them, and develop solutions to mitigate them in the future.”
– Carole Hemmelgarn, MS, MS, founding member, Patients for Patient Safety US

“Effectively addressing today’s patient safety challenges requires advanced analytics and evidence-based solutions that work across clinical settings. It’s not enough for individual teams to implement changes at the local level if we want to address preventable medical harm in the U.S. We need to first examine the complex factors that lead to safety issues and use applied science and human factors engineering to create proactive systems-based interventions to create sustainable improvements in patient safety. The NPSB will enable broader adoption of this approach to safety across health care and benefit all patients.”
– Raj Ratwani, PhD, vice president of Scientific Affairs for MedStar Health Research Institute and director of MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare

“My family experienced two separate medical errors that resulted in brain damage to my newborn son and the death of my husband. The realization that no-one was in charge of collecting data about my family’s harms, learning from those harms and developing solutions to prevent future harms was chilling. We can no longer look the other way. A National Patient Safety Board will collect such data, learn from that data, and expedite the development of solutions so that everyone engaged in health care are as safe as possible as soon as possible.”
– Sue Sheridan, MIM, MBA, DHL, founding member, Patients for Patient Safety US