Patricia McGaffigan, MS, RN, CPPS

Patricia is President, of the Certification Board for Professionals in Patient Safety, and Vice President of safety at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement where she is senior sponsor of the IHI’s Lucian Leape Institute and co-chair of the National Steering Committee for Patient Safety.

Before the merger with IHI, she served as Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Safety Programs at the National Patient Safety Foundation as well as roles in clinical practice, academia, and the medical device industry.

Patricia is a Certified Professional in-Patient Safety (CPPS), a graduate of the AHA-NPSF Patient Safety Leadership Fellowship Program, and serves on numerous national committees, taskforces, and technical expert panels, including the Survey of Patient Safety Culture Technical Expert Panel, the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety Editorial Advisory Board, the Advisory Committee of the Coalition to Improve Diagnosis, and the Partners for Nurse Staffing. She is a Board Member of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors, the Foundation to Advance Nursing in Massachusetts, and serves on Planetree’s Person-Centered Certification Committee.

She is the recipient of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses Lifetime Member Award, and in 2023 she received the University of North Texas Health Science Center’s Mary E. Luibel Distinguished Service Award and was named to Becker’s Review List of Patient Safety Experts to Know. Patricia received her BS in Nursing from Boston College and her MS in Nursing from Boston University.