Scott Griffith has decades of experience fostering collaborative cultures and transforming outcomes in health care, aviation, energy, and public safety. He has worked with hundreds of hospitals across the country and received the California Patient Safety Action Coalition Leadership Award.
During the Children’s Hospital Association 2025 Transforming Quality Conference, Griffith will unveil evidence supporting the integration of Collaborative Just Culture® and high-reliability principles to advance health care standards, improve patient safety, and enhance organizational resilience.
Children’s hospital quality leaders and staff will gain actionable insights into building consensus-driven systems that align safety, compassion, and operational excellence.
Why is collaboration especially important for health care organizations?
Children deserve the best that health care has to offer. When hospitals, clinics, and health care professionals collaborate and maintain high reliability, they save lives and help children thrive in better health.
Health care, like most modern entities, has become siloed as our technologies and specialties have evolved. When things go right, siloed organizations work well. When things go wrong, it can be challenging to unravel the interactions and apply preventative actions.
High reliability requires collaboration between people and systems. We must document, monitor, measure, align, and integrate.
Why is now the right time to share your message?
In 2024, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released the Patient Safety Structural Measure, acknowledging patient harm still occurs at significant rates.
But there’s a pattern to how bad things happen and a science to preventing them. In an industry growing more complex by the day, health care must focus as much on the science of delivery as the advancement of medicine. Both are critical to patients.
What do you want attendees to take back to their hospitals from your presentation?
The participants will gain an understanding that health care organizations will never become highly reliable by investigating adverse events alone. We must see, understand, and manage risk — not events — daily.
It starts with frontline employees and physicians feeling safe to report. We earn their trust by committing to a reliable, evidence-based program built on collaboration.
How will your message challenge attendees?
Health care professionals at all levels — from the executive suite to the physicians, advanced practice providers, nurses, and frontline support staff — have yet to be trained in reliability science, which requires blended expertise in systems engineering, behavioral science, and the legal and ethical principles underpinning our justice systems.
The Collaborative Just Culture program can be broken down into straightforward, easy-to-understand components, which I will cover during my presentation.
Name one thing you hope every attendee reflects on after your keynote.
We must ‘flip the iceberg.’ Accidents, adverse events, and inspections are the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Before we can be fair and just to our employees and physicians, we must first see and understand the risk that lies below the surface in our everyday successful outcomes that often go unreported and unmanaged. And we must identify and manage the systems and the environmental, cultural, personal, and competing influences affecting all of us.
Register for the Transforming Quality Conference.
