Beth Daley-Ullem
Beth Daley Ullem, MBA, is a nationally recognized governance expert and activist for safety and quality in health care. Beth is the founder and president of Quality and Safety first, a governance advisory firm. Beth works with health system leadership teams, boards, and health care industry leaders to improve the quality of patient care and better enable boards to provide governance oversight of quality and safety.
Beth was the project lead and lead author for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) White Paper: Framework for Effective Governance of Health System Quality. She has built innovative tools for IHI to assess and accelerate board governance of quality, known as the Governance of Quality Assessment (GQA). She was also an expert contributor to Leading a Culture of Safety: A Blueprint for Success and the Lucien Leape Institute’s White Paper entitled Shining a Light: Safer Healthcare Through Transparency.
Beth serves as IHI faculty for Board Governance and contributes to governance education nationally.
Beth established Quality and Safety First to work as an advisor to individual health systems on their board quality and safety capabilities as part of their operational excellence. Beth leads board education sessions and provides advisory services. Beth has also been a keynote speaker for many organizations on the topic of patient centered care, governance and transparency, including CMS, Leapfrog, AHA, Harvard’s ICHOM, Yale Health System, LA County, Kaiser Permanente’s Leadership Summit, Georgetown University’s Kennedy Center for Bioethics, Mayo Clinic, Beta Healthcare, Dignity Health, AMA, AHA, etc.
Beth currently serves on the boards of Solutions for Patient Safety, a 100+-hospital pediatric network, the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) and the Medstar Institute for Quality and Safety (MIQS). Beth was formerly on the Board of Governors of the National Patient Safety Foundation, now part of IHI, and the Center for Healthcare Value (now Catalysis). Beth also formerly served on the system boards of Thedacare, a hospital system in northeast Wisconsin, and the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Health System.
Beth is passionate about reducing harm and errors, improving the transparency of health care outcomes, and better enabling hospital boards to engage thoughtfully on quality issues. Her passion is driven by the loss of her son to a medical error in 2003 and her desire for all patients to have safe and respectful care and transparent clinical and quality outcomes.
Beth is a former consultant with McKinsey & Company and DePaul University professor of business. She lives in California with her husband and three children.
For more information about Beth, please see her website:
