CAPSAC grew out of a statewide need to improve California’s patient safety culture.

In the fall of 2005, a group of graduates of the prestigious California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF) Healthcare Leadership Fellowship formed a patient safety task force to see if there were opportunities to improve how health care is delivered in California. The Fellowship, which is provided through the Center for Health Care Professions at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), encourages its graduates look for these types of opportunities, and the task force members quickly determined that there were several patient safety issues that needed to be addressed.

 

The small initial group of task force members discussed forming a statewide collaborative similar to the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors. In 2007, they spoke at length with Paula Griswold, the executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition, as well as Jim Conway, a senior faculty member of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement. Griswold and Conway shared how the Massachusetts Coalition had developed and encouraged the task force members to network and create a similar statewide coalition in California.

 

Adding urgency to the task of forming a California patient safety coalition was a state bill (S.B. 1301) working its way through the California legislature. S.B. 1301 required mandatory reporting of medical errors. The task force members identified need for a forum to discuss the impact of the legislation and promote a culture supporting transparency around reporting of medical errors. They recognized that efforts to improve patient safety in California happened in silos based on the setting of care, and more could be accomplished by bringing together hospitals, medical groups, medical malpractice carriers, regulators, as well as other key stakeholders.

 

The Palo Alto Medical Foundation hosted the group’s first roundtable meeting in June of 2007. The attendees included the Deputy Director of the California Department of Public Health Center for Health Care Quality (CHCQ), as well as representatives from the following organizations:

 

California Hospital Association

BEACON

California Medical Association

The Doctors Company

Kaiser Permanente

Sutter Health

Lumetra

Catholic Healthcare West

The Woodland Clinic

 

After a series of meetings, the group adopted a charter and a name: The California Patient Safety Action Coalition. This was the true birth of CAPSAC. Next, it applied for and received a grant from the Center for Health Care Professions to hold a convening meeting in July 2008.

 

A few months before the meeting, the newly formed CAPSAC strategically partnered with risk management consulting firm Outcome Engineering to assist in the spread of the concepts of a Fair and Just Culture – the approach to improving patient safety systems that CAPSAC advocates. Outcome Engineering works with states across the country on improving patient safety systems, and CAPSAC wanted to make sure its efforts were aligned with those of other states, including North Carolina, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona.

 

Today, CAPSAC has grown to include about 60 healthcare organizations. It is run with donations of employee time and materials by member organizations, such as the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, as well as with funds remaining from the initial grant from the Center for Health Care Professions and new donations. The Center for Health Care Professions at UCSF administers the funding.