Current Thought Leadership
Dr. David Adams
Dr. David E. Adams is the president and CEO of Adams Strategy Group, Inc.: a specialized consultancy that embeds positive culture using strategic leadership. The Group targets the transformation of leadership approaches, improvement management, and strategy management. David’s expertise lies in embedding positive culture through transformational and positive leadership approaches, human and operations systems balance, operational excellence systems and strategies, and executive coaching. For the past fifteen years, Dr. Adams has focused his work on hospitals and healthcare systems where he has helped clinicians and systems reduce medical errors, a leading cause of death in the United States.
Latest Writing Projects
Embedding Safety Culture Using Operational Excellence Principles
Strategies for Sustained Safety Performance
For more than two decades, the US government and the healthcare industry have been attempting to improve the escalating rate of preventable medical errors. Despite these efforts, medical errors are a leading cause of death in the US. Perhaps the most alarming result of medical errors is preventable deaths, estimated between 250,000 to 400, 000 annually in the US. While most healthcare organizations have adopted some strategy to improve patient safety, the efforts are largely unproductive. This report focuses on an unusual integrated healthcare system that improved and sustained patient safety for more than a decade, responding to the specific problem of strategic leader in healthcare organizations who fail to foster a safety climate and reduce medical errors. The report identifies answers to why strategic leaders failed or succeeded and what factors lead to their success or failure.
Leadership for Reducing Medical Error
(This article was published in a 2022 Special Edition of Measuring Business Excellence, a peer-reviewed journal from Emerald Publishing). Medical errors have become the third leading cause of death in the USA. Two million deaths from preventable medical errors will occur annually worldwide each year. The purpose of this paper was to find themes from the literature relating leadership styles – leadership approaches in practice – with success in reducing medical errors and patient safety. The review found three leadership approaches and four leadership actions connected to successfully reducing medical errors and improving patient safety. The review concluded that leadership appeared to be the preeminent factor in reducing medical errors and improving patient safety. It also found that positive leadership approaches, regardless of the safety intervention, led to improving results and outcomes.