**4. Enhancing safety through role models, teamwork, and leadership**

Critical to the successful implementation of such self-learning and self-improving systems is the introduction of patient safety champions or individuals who actively promote patient safety within and across the organizational fabric [8]. These patient safety champions constitute a group of essential role models for other clinicians to emulate and provide sage insight into enhancing patient safety throughout healthcare organizations. The utilization of quality improvement measures directed at promoting the culture of safety and teamwork, for example in decreasing nosocomial hospital acquired infections, has resulted in improved patient care and non-trivial cost reductions [20]. In response to the constantly increasing complexity of healthcare in both inpatient and outpatient arenas, enhancing medical teamwork can improve patient safety and care by offering varying sources of input and knowledge to resolve complex safety issues, make prudent decisions, and complete tasks more productively and efficaciously [21]. Working in concert with patient safety champions, healthcare network's leadership must promote favorable patient safety practices, thereby promoting a well-integrated and comprehensive system of patient safeguards [6]. Properly organized, effective health system leadership necessitates that at every level of medical care delivery (unit, division, department, hospital, and health system), an organizational framework for safety and practice-based improvement exists that interacts effectively and efficiently across the entire matrix of care [11]. Pay-forperformance, a payment model that links quality of care with a corresponding level of payment for healthcare services, reinforces the patient safety role model in that the best performing clinicians will be more fully recognized for better, safer individual (and thus group) outcomes [22] **Figure 1**.

**Figure 1.** *Improving patient safety via role models, teamwork, and leadership.*
