Circulation 36,825 • Volume 18, No. 3 • Fall 2003

Cooper Receives AANA Award

Left to right: Jeffrey Cooper, PhD receives AANA Award from AANA President Rodney Lester, CRNA, PhD, and AANA Council for Public Interest representative Byron Anderson, CRNA, MS.

APSF founding member Jeffrey Cooper, PhD received the Public Interest in Anesthesia Award from the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) Council for Public Interest in Anesthesia. The award was presented on August 2, during the AANA’s 70th Annual Meeting held in Boston.

The Public Interest in Anesthesia Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions in the area of anesthesia patient safety and the promotion of quality anesthesia care.

Cooper is well known in the anesthesia community for his contributions to the prevention of adverse events and patient injury. His studies of human error in medicine in the 1970s were among the first ever conducted. He has served on the APSF Executive Committee continuously since its inception in 1986 and conceived of and later chaired its Committee on Scientific Evaluation for 13 years. He has often contributed articles to the APSF Newsletter.

Dr. Cooper’s activities include his role as the Director of Biomedical Engineering of the Partners HealthCare System, Inc. He is associate professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and on the faculty of the Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care. He is also an associate director of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology of Cambridge and Boston, MA. Dr. Cooper organized and is Director of the nonprofit Center for Medical Simulation, which focuses on training in the management of critical events, teamwork, and other issues relative to preventing patient injury. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the National Patient Safety Foundation and founder and chair of its Research Program.

In his acceptance speech, Cooper commented that, “It is the greatest honor so far in my professional life to receive this award from the Council for Public Interest in Anesthesia. All of us who work in patient safety must understand that safety is a never ending effort. The forces that strive to make healthcare more effective and efficient have a natural tendency to create new unsafe conditions. We must therefore be ever vigilant to identify the system issues that undermine safety. We must work to create organizations and cultures that have as their first priority the safety of all patients. It is my hope that all anesthesia professionals will join together in working collaboratively toward that goal.”