Lisa McGiffert

McGiffert, in 2015

Lisa McGiffert is an American patient safety advocate, who is known for being the director of the Consumer Reports Safe Patient Project, dedicated to patient safety concerns in hospitals.

Quotes

• Maybe if patients knew, they wouldn’t see the doctor. Maybe they still would. But they are doing it with their eyes open.
• The objection is that, gee, this would be very uncomfortable for doctors. What does that tell you? Sometimes you need that kind of pressure.
  • taken from an article by KQED, 30 November 2015
• They wanted to be active partners in deciding where they lived and who cared for them.
• The activists stormed the Texas Capitol and took over the governor’s office and got arrested. They were out there. All of that influenced me.
• Even when something gets done, it’s never done because the next year the industry, the hospitals, the medical device makers come in and try to erode any kind of progress made on the patients’ behalf.
• They have so many more resources than us, with lobbyists and staff people who are watching these issues all over the country, every day.
• It’s not okay that the record of my encounter at the hospital is so wildly inaccurate that it can’t be used to assess quality. Hospitals should be held accountable for accurate records.
• Cost of care has attracted a lot of attention, and it’s important that reporters cover it. But quality is just as important, more important really, and it contributes to cost.
• We need to know enough about the cost of medical harm.
  • taken from an interview conducted by the Association of Health Care Journalists, 3 October 2019
• I have this sense that doctors as a group protect other doctors who are on probation or get in trouble because they think it might happen to them.
  • taken from an article by NPR, 28 January 2016
• Physicians on probation are much more likely to require further discipline than physicians who were never disciplined.
  • taken from an article by CBS, 20 January 2016
• We were using data that had already been on state websites, but nobody had paid attention to it. Agencies are never going to do a media push when they publish these.
• Hospitals are ever-present in this work. They have lobbyists all over Congress and administration folks.
  • taken from a New York Times article, 4 December 2013
• It's really disturbing that the number of patients harmed and the number of facilities where this happened keeps rising. It probably indicates the number will continue to increase as authorities dig deeper.
  • taken from an article by PBS, 15 April 2016