Donald Berwick is President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). One of the Grand Challenge initiatives Don and the IHI have spearheaded is the 5 Million Lives Campaign, which aims to support the improvement of medical care in the United States.
Don conveys the powerful impact of the 5 Million Lives Campaign in his address at IHI’s 16th Annual National Forum on Quality Improvement in Health Care (December 2004): “The names of the patients whose lives we save can never be known. Our contribution will be what did not happen to them. And, though they are unknown, we will know that mothers and fathers are at graduations and weddings they would have missed, and that grandchildren will know grandparents they might never have known, and holidays will be taken, and work completed, and books read, and symphonies heard, and gardens tended that, without our work, would never have been.”
