A dynamic and deeply dedicated member of the medical community for nearly two decades, John J. Nance brings a rich diversity of professional training and background to the quest of patient safety and medical practice improvement.

John was one of the founding members of the National Patient Safety Foundation at the AMA and a member of the Executive Committee who has served on the board for 9 years. He is a native Texan who grew up in Dallas where he earned his Bachelor's Degree from SMU and his Juris Doctor Degree from SMU School of Law before admission to the Texas bar. Installed as a Distinguished Alumni of Southern Methodist University in 2002, he is also a decorated Air Force officer-pilot veteran of Vietnam and Operations Desert Storm/Desert Shield, and a Lt. Colonel in the USAF Reserve, well known for his pioneering involvement in Air Force human factors flight safety education.

John has become a trusted and internationally recognized broadcast analyst and advocate for both medical/patient safety and aviation safety. Before joining ABC World News and Good Morning America in 1994, he had logged countless appearances on national shows such as Oprah, the PBS News Hour, Today and CNN as well as most Canadian and English-speaking networks worldwide. In addition, his editorials have been published in newspapers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, and he has been listed for more than a decade in Who's Who in America.

John J. Nance is also the internationally-known author of 18 major books, (five non-fiction, 13 fiction), his latest being Orbit (Simon and Schuster) which released to rave reviews in March of 2006 and is in development by Fox 2000 studios as a major motion picture. Two other of his books, Pandora's Clock and Medusa's Child, were both made into major, successful two-part mini-series for NBC and ABC respectively, and still air periodically around the world.

With most of his busy schedule of consulting and speaking dedicated to the urgency of improving healthcare from patient safety to practice satisfaction, John has also emerged as one of the leading thinkers on matters of major change to America's healthcare system. A dynamic and vocal advocate of completely removing the tort system from involvement in medical accidents and mistakes, he recently convened and hosted an unprecedented conference on the subject with the sponsorship of AHRQ and released a major book on Patient Safety entitled Why Hospitals Should Fly.

Already one of the nation's most dynamic and energizing professional speakers, John J. Nance's messages to medical practitioners have reached new heights of relevance and importance as seen in his presentations to such pace-setting entities as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and a who's who of healthcare organizations.

John's unique ability to reach every member of the healthcare community comes from his unprecedented background mix of law, safety, aviation and even broadcasting. Physicians in particular resonate deeply with his powerful messages about leadership and the human propensity for mistakes even among the most tenured professionals, and his extensive experience working with hospitals and clinics nationwide has been documented by continuous client praise and the highest effectiveness ratings.

John J. Nance lives in Seattle, Washington and travels among healthcare organizations nationwide.

• Why Hospitals Should Fly: The Ultimate Flight Plan to Patient Safety and Quality Care - This presentation builds on the reality that American Healthcare is, in fact, a gigantic and complex Non-System. To achieve real patient safety and quality of care in such a chaotic environment requires building healthcare for the first time into a coherent, interactive system. The American Hospital cannot serve the patient's best interests as long as it continues in the tradition of Ben Franklin (the creator of the first American Hospital) as an institution built only for doctors, not for patients.
  
  The hospital must become a true unified entity in which even the outside physicians consider themselves an integral and proud part of the team - rather than independent practitioners merely renting space for their patients in a farmer's market. This lecture highlights the essential role of the physician as a leader (rather than a commander) in orchestrating the amazingly effective shift to Collegial Interactive Teamwork based on open communications, caring and trust. How the hospital board and C-suite become essential to this process of change - and how it can all be torpedoed by a CFO who refuses to understand the broader human effects of each cost-cutting decision - will upend your previous understanding. Why Hospitals Should Fly has become a runaway best seller in healthcare worldwide, and this presentation - recommended for 1.5 to 2.0 hours - not only explains why, but rallies the troops for immediate change.
  
  
• The Board's Pivotal Role in Patient Safety - It is not enough for a board to be concerned about patient safety - boards are primarily and individually responsible for each and every medical decision made in their institutions, and contrary to traditional practice, attempting to simply hand that clinical responsibility to the physicians opens the entire institution to ruinous lawsuits and public condemnation.
  
  This lecture will revolutionize the way your board looks at its duties and will delve deeply into the cause-effect relationship of the board's actions or inactions and the right of their hospital's patients to be free from unreasonable risk of inadvertent harm. With patient safety disasters (i.e. medical mistakes) now the 4th leading cause of death in the United States, these issues must be faced and acted on, not just debated. This is a pivotal wakeup call presentation best utilized in off-site board retreat settings.
  
  While John Nance will still accept some board presentations individually during 2010, the team approach of having both John Nance and Kathleen Bartholomew (his wife and the author of 4 major nursing books, including Ending Nurse-to-Nurse Hostility and Why Nurses Eat Their Young and Each Other) co-present for full board retreats is synergistically effective. Their efforts as a team speaking to board has been repeatedly praised for rapidly educating and redirecting the efforts of hospital boards through a hard-hitting exposure to the realities of what it takes to protect their patients.
  
  
• Ending Medical Apartheid - Aimed at physicians, this lecture targets the traditional 4,000 year history of keeping physicians separated from the rest of the healthcare community in ways that are ultimately the prime cause of poor communication, failed teamwork, toxic staff relations and patient safety disasters. The bottom line is that it will be forever impossible to have a safe and effective medical care system until Medical Apartheid is ended.
  
  In dozens of lectures during the last year, John Nance has guided doctors in how to overcome this traditional prejudice, and how to redefine themselves as team leaders with no loss of authority but a significant gain in effectiveness and respect by simply changing the way they relate to their own potential for mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others. This has been, in the majority of instances, a career-changing presentation.
  
  
• The 8 Major Dysfunctionalities of America's Healthcare Non-System - Bore-sighted at the subject of "Healthcare Reform" and how far we have to go from the first, very tentative and imperfect step of 2009, this lecture covers in completely up-to-date fashion not only the national shift in insurance methods, but the particulars of why the overarching goal of reform will never work without changing from fee-for-service community. Healthcare must transition, and fast, to a true system that is compensated more when needed less by an increasingly healthy population.
  
  The role of doctors and nurses and hospitals should be to improve health. The present system, however, cannot stay afloat financially if the number of patients needing its services drop significantly. Therefore, we have an upside down non-system that will only reward practitioners and hospitals if the public health does NOT improve (and the numbers of patients do not diminish). How we change that system into the "Firehouse Model" in which healthcare is compensated on an increasing basis for decreasing health problems resulting from their efforts is a key focal point of this talk, since the future of American Healthcare literally depends on finding the right answers (and methods).
  
  
• The Medical-Legal Mess and How it Indirectly Kills Patients - When someone is injured by a medical mistake, our legal system is ill-equipped to respond. The section of tort law known as Medical Malpractice has only one tool: the extraction of money for the wrongful hurting or killing of a patient. And the only means to apply that tool is a ruinously expensive and slow process that requires the lawyers to prove the medical professionals being sued were the most negligent, careless and outrageously unqualified oafs imaginable. Very seldom, however, do such persons exist. Most of the time those vilified in order to extract compensation are good doctors and nurses who have made a human mistake in a system ill-designed to catch it in time.
  
  Amazingly, however, very few people injured by medical mistake want money. What they want is answers and an apology, no additional bills for the botched medical "services" that led to the error, and a promise that the hospital/doctor/nurse/system will NEVER let it happen to anyone else. But, primarily due to practiced stonewalling by medical institutions and doctors, injured patients are forced to seek out a lawyer, only to find that very few can have their cases accepted.
  
  This lecture outlines how Mr. and Mrs. America have been completely disenfranchised by the current "Med Mal" system, and how the cure will require pulling the tort system completely away from incidents of medical MIS-practice - good people making human mistakes in an imperfect system. In the meantime, untold information that could save lives is kept sequestered from the rest of the medical community through paralytic fear of being sued.