J. Bryan Sexton, PhD
Director, Duke Center for Healthcare Safety & Quality
Dr. Sexton has captured the wisdom of frontline caregivers through rigorous assessments of safety culture, teamwork, and workforce resilience. His research instruments have been used around the world in over 3000 hospitals, in 30 countries. His current R01 grant from NIH is a randomized clinical trial of resilience training. He has studied teamwork, safety and resilience in high risk environments such as the commercial aviation cockpit, the operating room, and the intensive care unit, under funding from NIH, NASA, AHRQ, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Swiss National Science Foundation, and the Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz Foundation.
With specializations in organizational assessment, teamwork, survey development, and quantitative methods, he spends his time teaching, mentoring, conducting research, and finding practical ways of getting busy caregivers to do the right thing, by making it the easy thing to do. He has found that results across industries, work settings, shifts, professions, and countries highlight a great deal about reliability in high risk environments – specifically, “you are better off changing the situation, than trying to change human nature.”