Our daughter Kate lost her life to an incurable cancer. Unfortunately, her journey was made even more challenging by life threatening hospital-acquired infection, misdiagnosis, and significant and permanent loss of lung function from septic shock.

We knew that we were facing a great battle with Kate’s malignancy but we never counted on the ravages of medical error, miscommunication, and medical care that was fragmented and chaotic. We promised Kate that we would finish the book we started together, so that others could learn from our experiences and hopefully avoid many of the adverse events we faced. The book took eight years to complete and it was the beginning of our patient safety efforts.