U.S. House Bill to Establish an NPSB

On December 1, 2022, U.S. Representative Nanette Barragán (D-CA) introduced H.R.9377 – the National Patient Safety Board Act, legislation that would establish a National Patient Safety Board (NPSB), a nonpunitive, collaborative, independent home 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 COVID-19 pandemic has put the healthcare workforce in crisis, and safety is suffering.
  • NPSB’s data-driven solutions would prevent harm before it occurs and reduce the burden on frontline teams.
  • A growing coalition of leading healthcare organizations and experts 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 H.R.9377 – 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.

Use the form below to easily reach 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.

Submit your message

By completing the following form with your mailing address, your message will be delivered directly to your Congressional representative.

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. Yet until now Washington hasn’t taken action commensurate with the enormous scale of the problem. Solutions exist, but we need leadership and smart policy to bring them together wisely. That’s why I’m so grateful to Representative Barragán 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

“Health care is moving to new venues, and the integration of technology is creating an army of new providers. Now more than ever we need a national organization that looks broadly across the healthcare space and identifies ways that we can share experiences and insights that will make our systems of care safer for patients.”
– Joanne M. Conroy, MD, chief executive officer and president, Dartmouth 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

“We must find solutions that address the numerous safety gaps in the current U.S. healthcare system. A healthcare system that loses 250,000 patients each year due to preventable medical harm. A healthcare system that experiences healthcare workforce injuries, depression, suicide, and burnout rates at levels higher than almost every other U.S. industry. The creation of a National Patient Safety Board is the critical first step towards safer health care for all.“
– David Mayer, MD, executive director, MedStar Institute for Quality and Safety

“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